To non-German eyes the pair were worth looking at.  He was clad in tightfitting sage-green felt, so it appeared, with a superfluity of straps, buttons, lacings, and harness of all sorts.  A conical Tyrol hat garnished with a cock’s plume and faded violets was crushed between his back and that of the chair.  As his large nervous feet reached for the chairlegs below, one could see an expanse of moss-green stockings, only half concealed at the extremities by resplendent yellow sandals.  Bearded and moustached after the military fashion, nothing betrayed the professor except the myopic droop of the head.  As for Frauelein Linda Goeritz, no mere man may adequately describe her.  A German new woman of the artistic stamp, she was pastelling through Lombardy where the Professor was archeologising.  Short, crisp curls gathered about her boyish head.  Her general effect was of a plump bonniness that might yield agreeably to an audacious arm.  She cultivated an aggressive pertness that would have seemed vulgar, had it not been redeemed by something merely frank and German.  Shortskirted, she wore a high-strapped variant of the prevalent sandals.  The sides of her blue bolero were adorned with stilted yellow lilies in the top of the Viennese new-art mode.  In front her shirtwaist appeared cool and white, at the sleeves it flowered alarmingly into something like an India shawl.  A string of massive amethysts completed a discord as elaborate as a harmony of Richard Strauss.  Her whole impression was almost as inviting as it was grotesque.  One could not chat with her without liking her, and it is to be suspected that only a very guileless or austere male could like her without proceeding to manifest attentions.

By the cheese, she had captured her amazed professor, and then she carried him off bodily for coffee in the Arcade.  He talked little, but it didn’t matter, for she talked much and well.  Nor could a provincial Saxon scholar be quite indifferent at finding himself known to an intelligent and much travelled Viennese.  A cousin, it appeared, had followed his lectures and had highly extolled the ingenuity of his phonology of the Lombard tongue, a language which was, she must remember—­a hesitating pause—­yes, surely East—­“East Germanic, Ja wohl!” responded the Professor thunderously, though idiots had written to the contrary.  And then he told her at length the reasons why, until she pleaded her early morning sketching and firmly bound him to accompany her the next afternoon to the Certosa of Pavia.  The Herr Professor rarely paid much attention to hands, but as he held Frauelein Goeritz’s for Good Night he could not but note that it was soft and filled his big grip so well that he was sorry when it was gone.  He dismissed the observation, however, as unworthy a philologer and went to sleep pondering a new destruction for the knaves who held the Lombard tongue to be not East but West Germanic.