liveliness in the popular imagination : the shadow of an old gipsy-woman, grey and bent, with an inward squint, who drew her stick through the sand, and whose mumbling had been written down and handed down from generation to generation.…" The greatest happiness?" It should come to the land through a Prince "with one hand." He would give the country, the prophecy ran, more with his one hand than others could with two.… With one? But was everything all right with Klaus Heinrich's slim figure?
When one thought of it, was there not a weakness, a defect in his person, which one always avoided seeing when addressing him, partly from shyness, and partly because with charming skill he made it so easy not to notice it? When one saw him in his carriage, he kept his left hand on his sword-hilt covered with his right. One could see him under a baldachin, on a flag-bedecked platform, take up a position slightly turned to the left, with his left hand planted somehow on his hip. His left arm was too short, the hand was stunted, everybody knew that, and knew various explanations of the origin of the defect, although respect and distance had not allowed a clear view of it or even its recognition in so many words. But now everybody saw it. It could never be ascertained who first whispered and quoted the prophecy in this connexion—whether it was a child, or a girl, or a greybeard on the threshold of the beyond.
But what is certain is, that it was the people who started it, the people who imposed certain thoughts and hopes—and quite soon their conception of Miss Spoelmann's personality—on the cultured classes right up to the highest quarters, and exercised a powerful influence on them from below: that the impartial, unprejudiced belief of the people afforded the broad and firm foundation for all that came later. "With one hand?" people asked, and "the greatest happiness?" They saw Klaus Heinrich in the
