In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for him to be near her as often as the narrow compass of a throne and the all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something disturbed, watched, beset both,--a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have anticipated. What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear a--friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance of women to ivory, whose _white_ hue so readily becomes _yellow_, and which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again? These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the picture-exhibition of Goethe's Tasso. Fine art, and nothing but art, was with the Princess the art of Passau[35] against court- and life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques. The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess, that she herself got the Princess, Julienne the _confidente_ Leonore, Albano the Poet Tasso, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a street-sweeper in Cassel.