And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people's, mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;--but a single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,--and a slip in Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of "the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette's clouds cleared away when she heard that a paper escarpment and _cheval de frise_ against the Venner had been constructed at her door. "Then he will trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and deceiving everyone he comes across."[28] "We don't employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak grammatically," said Stiefel; "irregular verbs such as '_kriechen_, _trügen_, _lügen_,' though they are _verba anomala_, and as such have '_kroch_, _log_, _trog_,' and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German grammarians--although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others--and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, '_lügt_, _trügt_, _kriecht_,' &c., at the present day, that is." "Don't find fault with my dear Augspurger's Lutheran inflections," said Siebenkæs; "there's something touching to me about these irregular verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession." Here she drew her husband's ear softly down to her lips and said, "What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I'm out of the room, whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible." He asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as follows:--"We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob's tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night, and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?"