She loves to laugh at men, and
to make of life a paradox.
To the one, she played ravishing
strains, having first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf.
To the other, she piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle,
and he thought it was music, and danced!
A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw
back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish
young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding they could
not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves together in death.
The story, duly reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign
intelligence, read more like some old Rhine-legend than the record
of a real occurrence in this prosaic nineteenth century.
He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German
Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when
proposed to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his
consent. The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all
events improve, his fortune. He went to America, and there he
prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich - to find,
however, that he was too late. His lady, persuaded of his death,
had been urged into a marriage with a rich somebody else. In
ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented himself with
continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else
to pay for her keep.
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