"Funny, eh? They became very thick this year at Ostend or at Spa.... _Cherchez_ ... et cetera. It seems that just as there are women, you know, for whom people fight duels there's also another class across whom, as it were, you shake hands. Now they've left Europe together. Perhaps they'll found a kingdom on some island or other and Oskar Ehrenberg will be prime minister." Willy Eissler appeared. His complexion was sallow, his voice hoarse and he looked as if he had been keeping late hours. "Hullo, Baron! Forgive me not being thunderstruck but I have already heard that you are here. Some one or other saw you in the Kärtnerstrasse." George requested Willy to remember Count Malnitz to his father. He himself, he was sorry to say, had no time on this occasion to look up the old gentleman, to whom, as he observed with a pretty mock-modesty, he owed his position in Detmold. "So far as your future is concerned, Baron," said Willy, "I never had any anxiety about it, particularly since I heard Bellini sing your songs last year--or was it further back? But it is quite a good idea of yours, deciding to leave Vienna. You'd have been bound to have been taken for a dilettante here for a cool twenty or thirty years. That's always the way in Vienna. I know it. When people know that a man comes of a good family, has a taste too for pretty ties, good cigarettes and various other amenities of life, they don't believe that he has real artistic capacity. You wouldn't be taken seriously here without proof from outside.... So hurry up and furnish us with a brilliant one, Baron." "I'll make an effort to," said George. "By the way, have you heard the latest, gentlemen?" began Willy again. "Leo Golowski, the one-year-volunteer who shot First-Lieutenant Sefranek, is free." "Let out on bail?" asked George. "No, he's quite free. His advocate addressed a petition to the Emperor to quash the proceedings, and it turned out successful to-day." "Incredible!" exclaimed Breitner. "Why are you so surprised, Breitner?" said Willy. "It is possible, you know, for something sensible to happen in Austria once in a blue moon." "A duel is never sensible," said Skelton, "and therefore a pardon for a duel can't be sensible either." "A duel, my dear Skelton, is either something very much worse or something very much better than sensible," replied Willy. "It is either a ghastly folly or a relentless necessity, either a crime or an act of deliverance. It is not sensible and doesn't need to be so. In exceptional cases, one can't make any headway at all with common-sense, and I am sure you too will concede, Skelton, that in a case like the one of which we have just been speaking a duel was inevitable." "Absolutely," said Breitner. "I can imagine a polity," observed Skelton, "in which differences of that kind were settled by a court."