Page:Imre.pdf/58

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56

instance of the difference between the general and the particular. Very early in my meeting with Imre's more immediate circle of soidier-friends, I heard over and over again that to Imre, as one of the officers most distinguished in all the town for personal beauty, there attached a reputation of being an ever-campaigning and ever-victorious Don Juan... if withal one of most exceptional discretion. Right and left, he was referred to as a wholesale enemy to the peace of heart and to the virtue of dozens of the fair citizenesses of Szent-Istvánhely. Two of these romances, the heroine of one of them being an extremely beautiful and refined déclassée whose sudden suicide hand been the gossip of the clubs, were heightened by the touch of the tragic. But along with them, and the inore ordinary chatter about a young man's bonnes fortunes, or what were taken to be them, there were surmises and assertions of vague, aristocratic, deep, unconfessed ties and adventures. The Germans use the terms "Weiberfreund" and "Weiberfeind" in rather a special sense sometimes. Now, I knew that