While speaking, he had seated himself at the table and filled a goblet of sherbet from the fragrant bowl. As he was sipping it delicately, with his lips almost closed, his wife threw herself down upon the sofa by his side with such clumsy violence that the springs creaked, and her husband was so jolted that he lost his balance, and the contents of his glass were spilled upon his immaculate shirt-front. Much annoyed, he carefully dried his dripping garment with his napkin. "Now I shall have to dress again," he said in a tone of vexation. "To spill your glass over you just in the midst of such a conversation as this means no good," said his superstitious wife. "It means that you never will learn to conduct yourself like a lady," was the quiet reply. "Indeed!" she cried with a laugh. "So I must learn aristocratic manners that I may do more credit to your brother, who has drunk himself into an apoplexy! A fine aristocrat he is!" "Just because he disgraces his standing I will respect mine; and you should assist me to do so, instead of laughing. And when his estate is ours, I will show the world that it is not necessary to be born in an aristocratic cradle in order to be an aristocrat. The dismissed Marburg professor will yet play a part among the _élite_ of the scientific and fashionable world that a prince might envy him. Wealth is all-powerful; and where there is wealth with brains, men are caught like flies upon a limed twig." "Ah, how fine it will be!" cried his wife, excited by this view of the subject; and she hastily filled a glass from the bowl and drank it greedily. "It is indeed such good fortune that a man less self-controlled than myself might well-nigh lose his senses at the thought of it!" her husband rejoined. And there was a dreamy look in his light-blue eyes. "Then we can keep a carriage, and I shall drive out shopping, with footmen to attend me, and Gretchen shall have a French bonne, and shall be always dressed in white and sky-blue. We will live in the capital, and you, Leuthold, need never do another day's work,--you can amuse yourself in any way that pleases you." And the wife tossed her head proudly, as though already lolling upon the soft cushions of her carriage. "Do you suppose I could ever be a robber of time?" he asked her with a sharp glance. "No, most certainly not. If I had made the ten commandments, the seventh should have been, 'Thou shalt not steal a day from the Lord.' He who steals a day seems to me the most contemptible of all thieves." Ills wife laughed and displayed a double row of fine white teeth, whose strength she was just proving by cracking hazel-nuts.