Miss Zoë, however, interrupted, without any sign of awakened anxiety, “Probably he will do nothing; I am not an indispensable piece in his zoological collection; if I were, my heart would probably not have clung to you so unwisely. Besides, from my early years, I have been sure that a woman is of use in the world only when she relieves a man of the trouble of deciding household matters; I generally do this for my father, and therefore you can also be rather at ease about your future. Should he, however, by chance, in this case, have an opinion different from mine, we will make it as simple as possible. You go over to Capri for a couple of days; there, with a grass snare—you can practise making them on my little finger—catch a lizard _Faraglionensis_. Let it go here again, and catch it before his eyes. Then give him free choice between it and me, and you will have me so surely that I am sorry for you. Toward his colleague, Eimer, however, I feel to-day that I have formerly been ungrateful, for without his genial invention of lizard-catching I should probably not have come into Meleager’s house, and that would have been a shame, not only for you, but for me too.” This last view she expressed outside of the Villa of Diomede and, alas, there was no person present on earth who could make any statements about the voice and manner of talking of Gradiva. Yet even if they had resembled those of Zoë Bertgang, as everything else about her did, they must have possessed a quite unusually beautiful and roguish charm. By this, at least, Norbert Hanold was so strongly overwhelmed that, exalted to poetic flights, he cried out, “Zoë, you dear life and lovely present—we shall take our wedding-trip to Italy and Pompeii.” That was a decided proof of how different circumstances can also produce a transformation in a human being and at the same time unite with it a weakening of the memory. For it did not occur to him at all that he would thereby expose himself and his companion on the journey to the danger of receiving, from misanthropic, ill-humoured railway companions, the names Augustus and Gretchen, but at the moment he was thinking so little about it that they walked along hand in hand through the old Street of Tombs in Pompeii. Of course this, too, did not stamp itself into their minds at present as such, for a cloudless sky shone and laughed again above it; the sun stretched out a golden carpet on the old lava-blocks; Vesuvius spread its misty pine-cone; and the whole excavated city seemed overwhelmed, not with pumice and ashes, but with pearls and diamonds, by the beneficent rain-storm.