"In spite of your uniform and short-cropped hair. But you must accustom yourself to a more respectful way of speaking of her. One speaks now of Frau Crescentia Rossel, _nee_ Schoepf. They wrote me about this affair a good while ago; but as you refused, once for all, to listen to any news about Munich matters, I kept this event from you also. It must have come about curiously enough, and quite after the manner of the creature as she was then--I mean, before she had been tamed by the yoke of wedlock. You know--or don't you know yet?--that Rossel lost his whole fortune some time ago. He had invested it with his brother, who was at the head of a mercantile firm in the Palatinate, carrying on a brisk trade with France. This brother became a bankrupt in consequence of the war, and our Fat Rossel would have become a miserably poor devil overnight if he had not owned the house in the city and the villa out there on the lake. He immediately sold the house with all its appurtenances, of course at a low enough figure, for no one had much money to spare in war time. But for all that it was such a good round sum, that the interest from it just succeeded in keeping his head above water, though he could no longer live like a _grand seigneur_. A purchaser might also have been found for the villa; but in order not to disturb our good Kohle, who was in the very midst of his Venus frescoes, he resisted the temptation, and--who would have thought it?--aroused himself from his bear-skin to take up his brush again, though, to be sure, with much grumbling and cursing. This act of heroism seems to have melted, for the first time, the armor of ice in which the heart of the little red coquette was encased; particularly as he did not for a moment bemoan the loss of the property on his own account, but only expressed the deepest sympathy for his brother. To be brief, as he perceptibly pined away under all this, partly from love-sickness, partly because he had been obliged to dispense with the services of his all-too-sumptuous cook, this singular creature was touched with pity for his troubles, appeared one day in the scantily-furnished lodgings with which the former Sardanapalus was now forced to content himself, and announced to him, without any further ceremony, that she had been thinking the matter over, and was willing to marry him. She felt, to be sure, not a spark of sentimental love for him--such a love as that she had experienced but once in her life, and then it had gone badly with her--but she no longer felt any aversion toward him, and since he needed a wife who understood something about housekeeping, he had better go and make inquiries whether there wasn't another room and a kitchen to be had on the same floor, in which case they could go on living there.