"Ah, most gracious Lady, say nothing against youth. Youth, even with all its mistakes, is still beautiful and lovable, and age, even with its virtues, is not good for much. Personally I have, it is true, no right to say anything about this subject. About age I might have, perhaps, but not about youth, for, to be frank, I was never young. Persons with my misfortune are never young. That, it may as well be said, is the saddest feature of the case. One has no true spirit, one has no self-confidence, one hardly ventures to ask a lady for the honor of a dance, because one does not desire to cause her an embarrassment, and thus the years go by and one grows old, and life has been poor and empty." Effi gave him her hand. "Oh, you must not say such things. We women are by no means so bad." "Oh, no, certainly not." "And when I recall," continued Effi, "what all I have experienced--it is not much, for I have gone out but little, and have almost always lived in the country--but when I recall it, I find that, after all, we always love what is worthy of love. And then I see, too, at once that you are different from other men. We women have sharp eyes in such matters. Perhaps in your case the name has something to do with it. That was always a favorite assertion of our old pastor Niemeyer. The name, he loved to say, especially the forename, has a certain mysterious determining influence; and Alonzo Gieshübler, in my opinion, opens to one a whole new world, indeed I feel almost tempted to say, Alonzo is a romantic name, a fastidious name." Gieshübler smiled with a very unusual degree of satisfaction and mustered up the courage to lay aside his silk hat, which up to this time he had been turning in his hand. "Yes, most gracious Lady, you hit the nail on the head that time." Oh, I understand. I have heard about the consuls, of Kessin is said to have so many, and at the home of the Spanish consul your father presumably made the acquaintance of the daughter of a sea-captain, a beautiful Andalusian girl, I suppose; Andalusian girls are always beautiful." "Precisely as you suppose, most gracious Lady. And my mother really was a beautiful woman, ill as it behooves me personally to undertake to prove it. But when your husband came here three years ago she was still alive and still had the same fiery eyes as in her youth. He will confirm my statement. I personally take more after the Gieshüblers, who are people of little account, so far as external features are concerned, but otherwise tolerably well favored. We have been living here now for four generations, a full hundred years, and if there were an apothecary nobility--"