He was anything but delighted over the Countess Brainitz. He was familiar with the genealogy and history of the dead and living members of all the noble families of Europe, and so was thoroughly informed concerning her. “In her youth,” he reported, “she was an actress, one of those favourite ingénues who attune souls of a certain sort poetically by a strident blondness and by pulling at their aprons with touching bashfulness. With these tricks she seduced in his time Count Brainitz, a gentleman who had weak brains and a vigorous case of gout. She thought he was rich. Later it turned out that he was hopelessly in debt and lived on a pension allowed him by the head of the house. On his death this pension passed to her.” She was blond no longer. Her hair was white and had a metallic shimmer like spun glass. Its hue was premature, no doubt, for she was scarcely over fifty. She was corpulent; her body had a curious sort of carved rotundity; her face was like an apple in its smooth roundness; it gleamed with a healthy reddish tinge; and each feature--nose, mouth, chin, forehead--was characterized by a certain harmless daintiness. From the first moment she and Crammon found themselves hopelessly at odds. She clasped her hands in despair over everything he said, and all his doings enraged her. With her feminine instinct she scented in him the adversary of all her cunning plans; he saw in her another of those arch enemies that, from time to time, spun for one of his friends the net of marriage. She asked him to dine merely because of Letitia’s insistence. The girl explained: “Even if you don’t like him in other ways, aunt, you’ll approve of him as a guest. He’s very like you in one way.” But Crammon’s dislike of the countess robbed him of his usual appetite, so that the reconciliation even on that plane did not occur. She herself ate three eggs with mayonnaise, half of a duck, a large portion of roast beef, four pieces of pastry, a plate full of cherries, and additional trifles to pass the time. Crammon was overwhelmed. After each course she washed her hands with meticulous care, and when the meal was over drew her snow-white gloves over her little, round fingers. “All people are pigs,” she declared. “Nothing they come in contact with remains clean. I guard myself as well as I can.” Letitia sat through it all smiling in her own arch and tender way, and her mere presence lent to the common things about her a breath of romance. X Her estate having finally been sold at auction, and she herself being quite without means, Frau von Febronius had gone to live with her younger sister at Stargard in Pomerania. In order to spare her daughter the spectacle of that final débâcle she had sent the girl to the countess in Weimar.