The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano, as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates to the highest heavens in his innermost being! Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in his face, and rapidity of utterance. 31. CYCLE. Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or rather the _afterwinter_ of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered. With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions, and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project, and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in a _healthy_ state, then we should have a _good_ one into the bargain, and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing. It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."