Ottomar plunged into the room, into the midst of a circle which had grouped itself round Carla. An extraordinary feeling of perversity came over him. In this little room almost all his most decisive meetings with Carla had taken place; here it was the custom, when the company was smaller, to withdraw in order to talk more at ease; and here were now gathered together all his most intimate friends: a few of his favourite brother officers--Wartenberg, Tettritz--only Schönau was absent--a few of Elsa's particular friends, Elsa herself, even old Baroness Kniebreche had made her appearance, as she always did wherever she expected an interesting conversation, and, preventing Carla from rising off the small, blue silk sofa, had sunk into an armchair, in which, leaning forward, with her hand to her left ear, she listened eagerly to Carla's words. The only one of the party who was a stranger, as Ottomar himself had said a few minutes before to Clemda, was Count Golm; and this stranger stood, with one hand on the back of the small sofa, close to Carla, where he himself ought to have been standing, instead of remaining in the doorway, without the possibility of advancing a step farther into the crowded room, and not daring either to withdraw, after Baroness Kniebreche, turning her pince-nez angrily on him, had exclaimed: "There you are at last, when our dear Carla has been enchanting us with her clever talk--yes, yes, my dear Carla, positively enchanting us. Let your brother stand, Elsa; he has richly deserved it. For heaven's sake go on, my dear Carla!" Carla had hastily glanced towards the door through her eye-glass. "I cannot say any more without repeating what I have said already." "Then repeat it!" exclaimed the Baroness. "One cannot hear often enough that Wagner is the master of all masters who have ever lived or ever will live." "I did not say that, Baroness," said Carla, laying her hand on the old lady's; "only of those who have lived! It is not for nothing that the master calls his music that of the future; and the future is so called because it is yet to come. But who can venture to predict what will come?" "Is it not magnificent?" exclaimed the old lady--"positively magnificent?" "For," continued Carla, "deep as is my admiration for the master, I cannot conceal from myself, though with some trembling--only too natural in face of such incomparable greatness--that the mystical connection between word and sound--the Eleusinian mystery--proclaimed by the master, though only to the initiated, produces a deeper, more heart-felt satisfaction, in which the last remains of that barbarous separation which has hitherto existed between poetry and music entirely and for ever disappear." "Positively stupendous!" exclaimed the Baroness. "Magnificent!" growled Lieutenant von Tettritz. "But Wagner himself allows that," said Von Wartenberg.