"There are none other." She pouted deliciously. "You don't know everything under the sun." "Under your aureole of hair, do you mean?" "What if I do?" she smiled back. "You must not trust me too far. I am a spoilt child--wild, unbridled, unaccustomed to please others except by pleasing myself." Her actress-nature enjoyed the picture of herself. She felt that Baudelaire himself would have admired it. Lassalle's answer was subtly attuned: "My Satanic enchantress! my bewitching child of the devil." "_Bien fou qui s'y fie._ When I lived at Nice in that royal Bohemia, where musicians rubbed shoulders with grand-duchesses, and the King of Bavaria exchanged epigrams with Bulwer Lytton, do you know what they called me?" "The Queen of all the Follies!" "You know?" "Did I not love my Brunehild ere we met?" "Yes, and I--knew of you. Only I didn't recognize you at first, because they told me you were a frightful demagogue and--a--a--Jew!" He laughed. "And so you expected a gaberdine. And yet surely Bulwer Lytton gave you a presentation copy of _Leila_. Don't you remember the Jew in it? As a boy I had his ideal--to redeem my people. But if my Judaism offends you, I can become a Christian--not in belief of course, but--" "Oh, not for worlds. I believe too little myself to bother about religion. My friends call me the Greek, because I can readily believe in many gods, but only with difficulty in one." He laughed. "Is it the same in love?" Her eyes gleamed archly. "Yes. Hitherto, at least, a single man has never sufficed. With only one I had time to see all his faults, and since my first love, a Russian officer, I would always have preferred to keep three knives dancing in the air. But as that was impossible, I generally halved my loaf." The mountains rang with his laughter. "Well. I haven't lived a saint, and I can't expect my wife to bring more than I." "You bring too much. You bring that Countess." "My dear Helene," he said, struck serious. "I am entirely free in regard to the Countess, as she is long since as regards me. Of course she will, at the first shock, feel opposed to my marriage with a distinguished young girl on the same intellectual level as herself. That is human, feminine, natural. But when she knows you she will adore you, and you will repay her in kind, since she is my second mother. You do not understand her. The dear Countess desires no other happiness than to see me happy." "And therefore," said Helene cynically, "she will warn you to beware. She will hunt up all my offences against holy German morals--" "I don't care what she hunts up. All I ask is, be a monotheist henceforwards." "Now you are asking _me_ to become a Jewess." "I ask you only to become my wife." He caught her hands passionately. His eyes seemed to drink her in. She fluttered, enjoying her bird-like helplessness. "Turn your eyes away, my royal eagle!" "You are mine! you are mine!" he cried. "I am my father's--I am Janko's," she panted.