His delight at the pictures which Cato drew him of Flamin's similar heavenly ascensions and _feux de joie_ inspired him with the thought of earning his Quatraine[115] of beautiful days in some other way than by his foregoing gloomy ones,--namely, by making those of others like his own. In short, he concerted with the elder Cato, to whom the idea was most agreeable,--to employ the Prague company for some useful purpose, namely, in giving in the cool of the evening a ball on the green to the Maienthal children. What needed either for this purpose more than--which they immediately did--to thrust their hands into their pockets and their fingers into their purses and give the night watchman _loci_ more than the hay of his great meadow might be worth on St. John's day, which would have to be mowed to-day for a ball-room? Besides, the man gave it with a thousand pleasures, because his son was to-day to be--married. The twenty May-poles which Cato proposed to plant in the hall stood already incarnate there as autochthones. And when they had, further, gone to the parents of the neat village,--generally, however, the poor ploughman resembles the swine, which, according to Ælian,[116] invented his ploughing for him,--and unitedly and with the greatest earnestness--for peasants and ladies do not understand singularities--begged and extorted from them the young dancing-partners: then all was right. The trio of friends found, at the dinner-table of the Abbess, yesterday over again. Victor was immediately at home in all points; he would not continue a guest, so that the other might not continue the host. In general, maidens are seldom found again as one left them, just as their reception is always warmer or colder than their note previous; but in Clotilda's dissolving features an infinite charm announced the memory of yesterday, when she had, for two reasons, surrendered her heart to all his flames consecrated on the altar of nature and of virtue. In the first place, she was warmer yesterday, because she had previously been colder in the little quarrel which only her face had had about the Kussewitz watch affair: nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a little previous scolding and freezing, just as the grape-clusters acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better must. Secondly, in a high degree of emotion and love the best girls behave just like--good ones.