I did not reveal my own secret forebodings, but so much the more allowed these reasonings to come to the fore. Minna seemed to agree with me.
As we spoke Danish the old woman felt de trop, and was just going to creep out in her quiet way when Minna begged her to stay, and began to talk Saxonian dialect and Dresden slang with her; and in this funny language she joked so gaily, and put on such peculiar faces, that I soon quite forgot the feelings which had so recently depressed us, and the mother laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks.
When the old woman fell asleep after tea, Minna sat down at the piano and played a berceuse by Chopin. She also began to play a waltz, but over this she broke down more than once.
"I am not in form," she said and came to me. "I prefer to read to you."
She took Käthchen von Heilbronn, which we had begun and hoped to see acted in a few days.
We soon came to the charming episode where Kätchen will not lift her skirt when wading over the brook, and the old man-servant shouts—
"Only to the ankles, child, to the extreme lowest edge of the sole, Kätchen," but she runs away in order to find a plank.
"Yes, Hertz was right when he called you a Kätchen," I interrupted her. "Do you remember at the quarry, when we were going up?"
"Oh, indeed, I can remember it. When you were so obstinate and nasty! And if only you could have imagined how comical you looked, as if you had got on a mask which did not fit at all"
Then she read the most touching and, in all its naïveté,
