A little later one of Mozart’s letters is interrupted and is finished in a strange hand as follows: 

“Your good son has just been summoned by Countess Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be without a letter from him.  Next post he will write again.  I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable to you as what your son would have written.  I beg my compliments to your amiable daughter.  I am your obedient friend,

  “CONSTANZE WEBER.”

This is the first appearance in Mozart’s correspondence of this name.  Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia.  She had no dramatic or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played fairly well, especially at sight.  Strangely enough, she had an unusual fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his improvisations.

The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of friendship with the Webers.  The buzz became so noisy that it reached the alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that Wolfgang should move at once.

Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the gossip that he is to marry Constanze—­ridiculous gossip, he calls it.

“I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but I am not in love with her.  I banter and jest with her when time permits (which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the house), but nothing more.  If I were obliged to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.”

Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer’s.  The daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart’s head with a vengeance.  According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even Mozart could not flirt with her.  He draws an amusing picture of his predicament—­a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus: 

“She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,—­I am to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable.  But, worse still, she is seriously smitten with me.  I thought at first it was a joke, but now I know it to be a fact.  When I first observed it—­by her beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things—­I was obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth in a civil manner.  This, however, did no good, and she became more loving than ever.  At last I was always very polite, except when she began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she took my hand and said, ’Dear