Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot, especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.