My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray, and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture, with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials.... My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair, and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon." While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop. Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one, offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well; if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.