A shadow passed over Melitta's animated face as when a cloud drifts rapidly over a sunlit landscape. She looked for a few moments straight before her, as if she had lost the thread of the conversation. Then, awaking from her dream, she said: "Yes--as I said before--that is why I want Julius to go to school. But here I chatter and chatter and do not even ask you if you are hungry and thirsty, and yet you must be so after all your travels on highways and byways. Come, we will go in and see if we cannot hunt up somebody to bring us some refreshment. I want it as much as you do, for I just remember that I have not dined to-day. Have you never been in the house?" "Yes, at least in the great hall; I asked a large old clock if I might present myself before the lady of Berkow, but it answered: Non-sense! Non-sense! so I went away again." Melitta had risen and put on her straw hat, without troubling herself about the ribbons, of which one hung down on her bosom, and the other on her back; now she said, smiling, while Oswald had picked up the book and was looking at the title: "I suppose you also read something in all you see?" "Yes, generally. This book, for instance, tells me: My mistress would have done better not to read me, since there are so many better books that she might read." "Alas! we poor creatures who live in the country, we must read what the circulating library or the bookseller sends us. But why do you dislike these _Mystères_?" "In the first place, it annoys me to find them wherever I go. In Grunwald the book was lying on every table; I was not two days at Grenwitz before it followed me there, and here I must find it even in your house. I have never been able to read farther than the second volume, and here you are, to my amazement, already in the fourth. How _can_ you take an interest in this Chourineur, this _maître d'école_, this Chouette and all the other rascally people? Surely, not half as readily as in the beasts of a menagerie, for these are at least God's own creations, whilst those men are nothing better than the misshapen children of the wanton imagination of a used-up poet's brains." "You may be right," said Melitta, as they were coming down from the terrace. "It is perhaps a real misfortune that such books are written, and a greater one yet that we, and especially women, whose education and training are every way grievously neglected, find after all a kind of pleasure in them. For the rest, I accept all that Sue says of that canaille as gospel truth, as I do with the reports of travellers in distant lands and the marvels they have seen on shore and on board ship. I believe him perhaps all the more readily, as he paints that sphere of society in which I live, partly at least, with great truth, fulness, and accuracy." "You do not really think _Rudolphe, grand duc régnant de Gerolstein_, to be true to life?"