Timm rested his head in his hand, as Oswald had been doing these last ten minutes. A pause followed, while bald-headed Charles placed a new bottle of champagne into the wine-cooler, turned it round a few times in the ice, and then left them again as noiselessly as he had come. This sudden transition from exuberant hilarity into such melancholy silence, in an elastic nature like Surveyor Timm's, was somewhat too sudden to be perfectly natural. Oswald, however, was too busy with his own thoughts to notice this. He thought Timm was sincere, and he was flattered by the lively interest which he had excited in a man whom he had heretofore looked upon as altogether frivolous and selfish. He filled his own glass and Albert's from the new bottle, and said, "I am not ungrateful, Timm; I am really not so; and least of all in this case. And if I have heretofore not put full faith in your friendship, it was only because I felt how little I had deserved it. Let us have another glass together! You know you must not be exacting with a melancholy man like myself!" "Well, I should think I knew that," said Timm, with his usual merry laugh, pushing back the long fair hair that had fallen down upon his forehead, and emptying his glass at a single draught. "And I have often wondered how a man like yourself, who has a right to enjoy life more than any one else, can look upon the world in a way which seems only fit for sick canary birds and like invalids. I should say nothing if you had never commenced to enjoy it from mere bashfulness, or if you had wasted your strength in enjoyment; but as neither the one nor the other is evidently the case with you--as you are not an enthusiastic saint nor a worn-out roué--as you suffer neither from an exuberance of strength nor from too great weakness, I really cannot tell what is the matter with you, except one thing." "And what is that?" Mr. Timm rested his elbows on the table, and the smooth face in his white hands, and smiled craftily at Oswald. "And that is--what, Timm?" "Ten thousand dollars annual income." Oswald laughed. "A very prosaic remedy for contempt of the world." "But a very radical one, and in your case infallible." "Why exactly in my case?" Timm filled the glasses once more, lighted a fresh cigar, and said: "Heine, you know, divides men in two classes: fat Grecians and lean Nazarenes. I have found this distinction as acute as true. The former believe in Our Lady of Melos, the latter worship the Virgin Dolorosa. The former enjoy the good things of life in cheerful happiness; the latter prefer a grumbling resignation and meditative asceticism. In order that both classes should be right, that the Grecians should be able to live well and the Nazarenes pray well, the former must have an abundance of money, and the latter must be poor, very poor indeed." "Before you go on with your exposition, Timm, tell me first to which of the two classes you belong yourself."