“Then up to the time when people call us ‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had really acquired a remarkable attachment for you, and thought that I could never find a more pleasing friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm in alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people (I count girls such) must surely have something with which they can occupy their thoughts and the like. Then you were that something, but when archæology overcame you, I made the discovery that you—excuse the familiarity, but your new formality sounds absurd to me—I was saying that I imagined that you had become an intolerable person, who had no longer, at least for me, an eye in his head, a tongue in his mouth, nor any of the memories that I retained of our childhood friendship. So I probably looked different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at a party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course, there was nothing that marked me out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way. To you I was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had formerly pulled so often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as grandiose as an—archæopteryx; I believe the excavated antediluvian bird-monster is so called; but that your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me as something excavated and restored to life—I had not surmised that of you, and when you suddenly stood before me unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to understand what kind of incredible fancy your imagination had invented. Then I was amused and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you.” (_G._ p. 101.)