For a long while she had been praising the doings of the three combmakers, and had called them three decent and sensible men; for she had closely observed them. When, therefore, Dietrich, the Suabian, began to linger longer and longer in her dwelling when bringing or fetching his shirt, and to pay court to her, she treated him in a friendly manner and kept him near her for hours by means of her lofty conversation. And Dietrich talked back, of course, to please her, just as much as he could; and she was one of the kind that could stand more than a fair measure of laudation. Indeed, one might truthfully say that she liked it all the more the more spiced and peppered it was. When praising her wisdom and kindness, she kept still as a mouse, until there was no more of it, whereupon she would with heightened color pick up the thread where it had been dropped, and would touch up the painting in those spots where it seemed to require a trifle of additional color. And Dietrich had not been going back and forth in her house for any great length of time when she showed him that mortgage of hers, and he thereupon began to exude a quiet, sedate species of self-satisfaction, and began to behave toward his rivals with such stealth as though he had invented the perpetuum mobile. Jobst and Fridolin, however, soon unearthed his secret, and they were amazed at the depth of his dissimulation and at his cleverness. Jobst above all clutched his hair and tore out a good handful of it; for had he himself not been going to the same house for a long while, and had it ever occurred to him to look for anything there but his clean linen? Rather, he had hitherto almost hated the washerwomen because he had been forced to dig up a few stuyvers every week to pay them. Never had he thought of marriage, because he was unable to conceive of a wife under any other aspect than that of a being that wanted something out of him which he did not deem her due, and to expect something from such a feminine creature that might be of advantage to him had never entered his thoughts, since he had confidence only in himself, and his calculations had so far never gone beyond the narrowest horizon, that of his secret. But now reflecting deep and serious he reached the determination to outdo this sly little Suabian, for if the latter should really succeed in getting hold of Dame Zues' seven hundred florins, he might become a keen competitor. The seven hundred florins, too, suddenly shone and glittered very differently, in the eyes both of the Saxon and of the Bavarian. Thus it was that Dietrich, the man of invention, had discovered a land which soon became the joint property of the three, and thus shared the hard lot of all discoverers, for the two others at once got on the same track and likewise became steady callers on Zues Buenzlin. She therefore saw herself surrounded by a whole court of decent and respectable combmakers. That she relished