The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count (while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever, and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved; how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as one going to bed. We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again, like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become _undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them so. The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana. But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.