Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral--every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it--a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging--so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for the _live_ beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the wigmaker's wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always combing at wigs in the bookbinder's on the occasions when the Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his _entrée_ into the childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing--no window, no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple's bed.