And I used ever to say:  “Helene, when I am truly in love I will e’en bring her here to you, and, by my faith, if you approve not—­why, there is an end of the matter.  Back she goes to her mother like a parcel of returned goods—­aye, if she were the Kaiser’s daughter herself!”

Whereat she pouted and was not ill-pleased.

“Ah, my man,” she would reply, “after a girl hath said you nay a time or two, it will bring you down from these high notions, and be much for your soul’s final good!”

But yet, when I could keep her in good-humor, it was exceedingly sweet to bide quietly in the house with the Little Playmate—­far better than to gad about with Texels and meandering fools, which indeed I did oftentimes just because it made my little lass so full of moods and tenses—­like one of Friar Laurence’s irregular verbs in his cursed Humanities.  For there is nothing so variously delightful as a woman when she is half in love and half out of it—­more interesting (say some) though less delightful than when she is all and whole in love.  Nevertheless, there are exceptions, and one woman at least I know more various, and more delicious also, since love’s ocean hath gone over her head, than ever she was when, like a timid bather, she shivered on the brink or made little fearful plunges, as it were knee-deep, and so ran out again.

But I am not come to that in the story yet.

Well, on the afternoon of the next day, who should come to the house in the Red Tower but our Helene’s gossip, for this week at least her bosom friend, Katrin Texel.  She was even more impressive in manner than ever, and also a little pleasanter to behold.  For her angles were clothing themselves into curves, and she was learning, perhaps from the Little Playmate, to leave off bouncing into a room like a cow at the trot, and to walk in sedately instead.  By-and-by I knew she would come sailing down the street like a towered galleon from the isles of Ind.  For all that, she looked not ill—­an academic study for Juno, one might say.  But to make love to—­why, as Helene was wont to remark, Feech!

And the curious thing about Katrin Texel was that though her corporeal part might be a direct inheritance from her Burgomeister father and his substantial brewery, her spirit had been designed for an artful fairy of half her size, in order that it might go pirouetting into airy realms of the imagination.  For she was gay enough and lightsome enough in her demeanor.  She came in with a skip which would have been entrancing in some elfish mignonne who could dance light-foot on spring flowers without crushing them.  But when this our solid Burgomagisterial Katrin tripped in, it nearly drove me wild with mirth.  For it was as if some bland maternal cow out of the pasture had skipped with a hop and a circle of flying skirts into a ballroom or a butterfly of two hundred pounds’ weight had taken to flitting from flower to flower.