They considered such action more suitable to their rank than to permit an engagement from love, as among ordinary people. The fine portraits of the court-painter were intended to arouse in the reluctant Count some interest for his unwilling bride, but they had the opposite effect. Nor did the half-length portrait of the Count, that arrived at the same time in Westerau, have any better success. This portrait represented the young man as a hussar. Vierstein could not boast of a court-painter--his court being interested only in hunting and the army--so the picture had been painted by a traveling artist, whose vigorous brush had given the poor Count’s face a ferocious expression. The Princess was frightened to tears, as she had been when a child. And Fräulein von Martigny made use of this fear to give background to the cousin’s bad reputation. She hinted at a certain Potsdam barrack atmosphere that Vierstein carried into sitting-room and bedrooms; that no one over there cared for anything but soldiers, horses, dogs. For in her heart the Fräulein shared Isabella’s aversion to this marriage, and would have preferred to see her beloved foster child become an old maid. Then might the Fräulein be to the end of her life Mistress of the Robes at this dear court, whose ennui she was not sensible of, although she did her utmost to promote it. To be sure the painting and the painting lessons were as tiresome as everything else in the castle, yet a certain dramatic interest was attached to them--an interest that was woefully lacking in the rest of the day’s proceedings, which went like clockwork--and all the clocks in the castle were correct. Every day the Prince rode out at the same hour, on the same road, and returned at the same minute. Breakfast was served at eleven o’clock; at twelve o’clock they held an audience, the Princess as well. Her lady-in-waiting was careful to impress upon her beforehand how to open the conversation. There were only three phrases from which to select; Isabella sometimes wished to add a fourth or fifth, but had not the courage to do so. They dined at three o’clock. Conversation at table, though the merest gossip, was very solemn. Isabella discovered, in listening to it, that the people in the town could not be quite such bores as were those in the castle, for, at least, they furnished material for conversation. She sometimes wished to become acquainted with the wife of one of the officials or even of a common tradesman, but Fräulein assured her that that would be improper as well as unpleasant. “These common people have such a peculiar odor,” she said, taking a double dose of snuff. She always maintained that it was one of the finest traits in the Landgrave of Hesse, that he could not bear the odor of common people.