So I aired my book of chivalry to Katrin Texel.

“Fair maid,” said I, “have you heard the refrain of the song that I love so well?  It is like sweet music to me to hear it.  I love sweet music.  This is the latest catch: 

“‘My true love hath my heart and I have his.’

“How goes it, Helene?” I asked, turning to her as she stood smiling bitterly by the window.  For I knew that it would annoy her to be referred to.  “Goes it not something like this?”

And I hummed fairly enough: 

“‘My true love hath my heart and I have his.’” *** “And if it goes like that,” said she, quickly, “it goeth like a tomcat mollrowing on the tiles in the middle of the night.”

Now this being manifestly only spiteful, I took no notice of her work.  “Helene does not love good music,” said I; “’tis her only fault.  But I trust that you, dear Katrin, have a greater taste for angelic song?”

“And I trust you love to scratch upon the twangling zither as cats sharpen their claws upon the bark of trees?  You love such music, dear Katrin, do you not?” cried Helene over her shoulder from the window.

But Katrin, the divine cow, knew not what to make of us.  I think she was of the opinion that Helene and I, with much study upon books, had suddenly gone mad.

“I do indeed love music,” she said at last, uncertainly, “but, Master Hugo, not the kind of which my gossip, Helene, speaks.  I love best of all a ballad of love, sung sweetly and with a melting expression, as from a lover by the wall to his mistress aloft in the balcony, like that of him of Italy, who sings: 

“‘O words that fall like summer dew on me.’

“How goes it?

“‘O breath more sweet than is the growing—­the growing—­’”

She paused, and waved her hand as if to summon the words from the empty air.

“’The growing garlic,’ if it be a lover of Italy,” cried Helene, still more spitefully.  “This is enough and to spare of chivalry, besides which Hugo hath his lessons to learn for Friar Laurence, or else he will repent it on the morrow.  Come, sweetheart, let us be going.  I will e’en convoy thee home.”

So she spoke, making great ostentation of her own superiority and emancipation from learning, treating me as a lad that must learn his horn-book at school.

But I was even with her for all that.

“And so farewell, then, dear Mistress Katrin,” said I.  “The delicate pleasure of your presence shall be followed by the still more tender remembrance which, when you are gone, my heart shall continue to cherish of you.”

That was indeed well-minded.  A whole sentence out of my romance-book without a single slip.  Katrin bowed, with the airy grace of the Grand Duke’s monument out in the square.  But the little Helene swept majestically off, muttering to herself, but so that I could hear her:  “’O wondrous, most wondrous,’ quoth our cat Mall, when she saw her Tom betwixt her and the moon.”