“All that is written as distinctly on the tender swain’s face as if I had it before me in black letter, but unfortunately it has as little power to move me to reckless haste as the angry visage into which your affectionate one is now transformed.  The Scripture teaches us to prove before we retain.  Yet if, on this account, you take me for a woman whose heart and hand can be bought for gold, you are mistaken.  Worthy Peter Schlumperger is constantly courting me.  And I?  I have asked him to wait, although he is perhaps the richest man in the city.  I might have Bernard Crafft, too, at any time, but he, perhaps, is as much too young as Herr Peter is too old, yet, on the other hand, he owns the Golden Cross, and, besides, has inherited a great deal of money and a flourishing business.  I keep both at a distance, and I did the same—­only more rigidly—­last year when the Count Palatine von Simmern made me proposals which would have rendered me a rich woman, but only aroused my indignation.  I dealt more indulgently with the Ratisbon men, but I certainly shall take neither of them, for they care more for the wine in the taproom than the most exquisite pleasures which music offers, and, besides, they are foes of our holy faith, and Herr Schlumperger is even one of those who most zealously favour the heretical innovations.”

Here she hesitated and her eyes met his with distrustful keenness as she asked in an altered tone: 

“And you?  Have not you returned to the false doctrines with which your boyish head was bewildered in the school of poetry?”

“I confided to you then,” he exclaimed, deeply hurt, “the solemn vow I made to my poor mother ere she closed her eyes in death.”

“Then that obstacle is removed,” Barbara answered in a more gentle tone, “but I will not take back even a single word of what I have said about other matters.  I am not like the rest of the girls.  My father—­Holy Virgin!—­how much too late he was born!  Among the Crusaders this fearless hero, whom the pepper-bags here jeer at as a ‘Turkey gobbler,’ would have been sure of every honour.  How ill-suited he is for any mercantile business, on the other hand, he has unfortunately proved.  Wherever he attempted anything, disappointment followed disappointment.  To fight in Tunis against the crescent, he let our flourishing lumber trade go to ruin!  And my mother!  How young I was when her dead body was borne out of the house, yet I can still see the haughty woman—­whose image I am said to be—­in her trailing velvet robe, with plumes waving amid the curls arranged in a towering mass upon her head.  She was dressed in that way when the men came to sell our house in the Kramgasse at auction.  She must have been one of the women under whose management, as a matter of course, the household is neglected.”

“How can you talk so about your own mother?” Wolf interrupted in a somewhat reproachful tone.