The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing her with the idea that she shouldn't give herself the slightest bother of any kind about the nincompoop. "It was no good," she said, "what would he think of me?" It was not until having eliminated from the room as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the 'Selection from the Devil's Papers,' she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table--that the head of the house ramped up--on his hind legs, pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation. Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly; one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks. He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over; and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there. Thunder was to him a watchman's rattle, arousing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment's hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his teeth and snarls at them. Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest satiric touch, and you can't manage to hit them with one, richly as they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.