and on, and went through with their parts. As a rule he thought them bad, rough in the means they employed to please, and unpractised in the more subtle dissembling of the natural and artless. For the rest, he was disposed to prefer humble and popular scenes to the exalted and ceremonious.
A soubrette called Mizzi Meyer was engaged at the "Vaudeville" theatre in the capital, who in the news papers and on the lips of the public was never called anything but "our" Meyer, because of her boundless popularity with high and low. She was not beautiful, hardly pretty, her voice was a screech, and, strictly speaking, she could lay claim to no special gifts. And yet she had only to come on to the stage to evoke storms of approbation, applause, and encouragement. For this fair and compact person with her blue eyes, her broad, high cheek-bones, her healthy, jolly, even a little uproarious manner, was flesh of the people's flesh, and blood of their blood. So long as she, dressed up, painted, and lighted up from every side, faced the crowd from the boards, she was in very deed the glorification of the people itself—indeed, the people clapped itself when it clapped her, and in that alone lay Mizzi Meyer's power over men's souls. Klaus Heinrich was very fond of going with Herr von Braunbart-Schellendorf to the "Vaudeville" when Mizzi Meyer was playing, and joined heartily in the applause.
One day he had a rencontre which on the one hand gave him food for thought, on the other disillusioned him. It was with Martini, Axel Martini, the compiler of the two books of poetry which had been so much praised by the experts, "Evoë!" and "The Holy Life." The meeting came about in the following way.
In the capital lived a wealthy old man, a Privy Councillor, who, since his retirement from the State Service, had
