Bertram, wishing to relieve his friends in their evident embarrassment, came to the rescue, saying, with smiling, easy politeness: "Fräulein von Aschhof only proves by her kind assertion of my immutability, that she is indeed looking upon the world and mankind with a poetical eye. But let us remember this--the poets themselves allow only the fair sex to participate in the pleasing prerogative of the calmly careless ever youthful gods; and the poets may venture on this deception, because the listener is willing to be deceived. 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,' who ever ventured to count up the years of an Antigone, an Iphigenia, a Helena? They are what they were--else they are not. But, even the poet's flattering arts cannot keep the man from aging; and if the poet would grant perennial youth to a man, he must needs let him die in his youth--like Achilles." "I protest against this theory," Lydia exclaimed eagerly. "I assert that heroes age as little as heroines." "Even that," Bertram replied with a smile, "would not help me, seeing that I am no hero, assuming even that you were right. But I may be permitted to indulge in some humble doubt. At best the hero of the Odyssey appears distinctly as a man of mature age,--to put it mildly,--and Pallas Athene must practise upon him her divine art of beautifying before she ventures to introduce him among the Phæaci." The Baron was meanwhile playing with his spoons and forks again; he was evidently annoyed at having been so long kept out of the conversation. Bertram went on as though he did not notice it at all; he very surely was not speaking for that fellow's sake. He only cared to clear himself in Erna's eyes from any suspicion that he, like the aged coquette opposite him, was laying claim to a juvenility which had gone by for ever; and seeing those eyes steadily bent upon him, he took heart of grace, and went on in the same tone of easy, good-humoured banter-- "Göethe, a modern, and in this case a tragic, poet too, in his Nausicaan fragments, wisely forebore to bring in that art of beautifying, which is only lawful for the epic poet in his antique naïvety, and in order to bridge over the mighty difference and distance of years, and to change the evidently improbable into something at least credible, he takes refuge in illusion, causing it to arise from the child's very heart, like a fog enveloping those pure eyes, that clear mind-- 'That man must ever be a youthful man, Who is well-pleasing to a maiden's eyes.'[1]