Suddenly I hear the booming of the tower clock. "Can't I get it a little cheaper?" I ask half-throttled. "Well, did you ever?" she says, obviously hurt. "There are ten roses in the bunch; they cost a mark a piece at this time. We throw in the riband." I am disconsolate and am about to leave the shop. But the old saleswoman who knows her customers and has perceived the tale of love lurking under my whispering and my hesitation, feels a human sympathy. "You might have a few roses taken out," she says. "How much would you care to expend, young man?" "Eight marks and seventy pfennigs," I am about to answer in my folly. Fortunately it occurs to me that I must keep out a tip for her maid. The ladies of the theatre always have maids. And I might leave late. "Seven marks," I answer therefore. With quiet dignity the woman extracts _four_ roses from my bunch and I am too humble and intimidated to protest. But my bunch is still rich and full and I am consoled to think that a wooing prince cannot do better. Five minutes past seven I stand before her door. Need I say that my breath gives out, that I dare not knock, that the flowers nearly fall from my nerveless hand? All that is a matter of course to anyone who has ever, in his youth, had dealings with faeries of Thea's stamp. It is a problem to me to this day how I finally did get into her room. But already I see her hastening toward me with laughter and burying her face in the roses. "O you spendthrift!" she cries and tears the flowers from my hand in order to pirouette with them before the mirror. And then she assumes a solemn expression and takes me by a coat button, draws me nearer and says: "So, and now you may kiss me as a reward." I hear and cannot grasp my bliss. My heart seems to struggle out at my throat, but hard before me bloom her lips. I am brave and kiss her. "Oh," she says, "your beard is full of snow." "My beard! Hear it, ye gods! Seriously and with dignity she speaks of my beard." A turbid sense of being a kind of Don Juan or Lovelace arises in me. My self-consciousness assumes heroic dimensions, and I begin to regard what is to come with a kind of daemonic humour. The mist that has hitherto blurred my vision departs. I am able to look about me and to recognise the place where I am. To be sure, that is a new and unsuspected world--from the rosy silken gauze over the toilet mirror that hangs from the beaks of two floating doves, to the row of exquisite little laced boots that stands in the opposite corner. From the candy boxes of satin, gold, glass, saffron, ivory, porcelain and olive wood which adorn the dresser to the edges of white billowy skirts which hang in the next room but have been caught in the door--I see nothing but miracles, miracles.