Meanwhile, Thérèse runs on with her usual fluency:
"It is an immense pity that my brother-in-law cannot make up his mind to marry. You really cannot imagine, ladies, the pains I have taken to throw the lasso over his head. Quite in vain! And such superb matches as I have made for him,--Marguerite de Lusignan, who has just married the Duke Cesarini, and the charming Marie de Gallière,--in short, the loveliest, wealthiest girls,--_tout ce qu'il y a de mieux_. Oddly enough, the mothers liked him as well as the daughters. In vain! I never have seen a man with so decided a distaste for matrimony as Edgar's. Did you chance to hear of the scheme by which he contrived in Grätz to rid himself of man[oe]uvring mammas?"
"Yes," says Stella, very coldly: "he spread abroad a report that he had suddenly lost his property."
"A delicious idea," Thérèse laughs. "Do you not think so?"
"It never occurred to him to originate the report," Edmund interposes now, rather irritably; "he was merely too lazy to contradict it. To hear you talk, Thérèse, one would suppose Edgar to be the most self-conceited coxcomb under the sun,--a man who spent his life in defending himself from the attacks of matrimonially-inclined ladies. But I assure you, Baroness Stella, that Edgar has not a trace of such nonsensical coxcombry. Perhaps you know him well enough to make your own estimate of his character."
"I know him very superficially," Stella replies, with a shrug.
"Why, I thought you spent several weeks last summer with him at Leskjewitsch's," says Rohritz, looking at her in surprise.
Without making any reply to this remark, Stella opens and shuts her fan, and says, with a slight curl of her lip, "His heroic opposition seems overcome at last; for, as I learned lately from a letter from Grätz, he has just been betrothed to a certain little Countess Strahlheim."
"Who wrote you so?" Thérèse cries. "That interests me immensely! Oh, the Machiavelli!"
"I had the intelligence from a Fräulein von Gurlichingen," says Stella.
"Gurlichingen? Anastasia Gurlichingen?" asks the Baron.
"You know the Gurlichingen?" Stella asks, in her turn.
"Know her! Who does not know the Gurlichingen?" says Rohritz. "She is the most restless phantom I have ever encountered, continually fluttering to and fro through the world, always in the train of some wealthy friend who pays her expenses. It has been her specialty hitherto to sacrifice herself for consumptive ladies: she has haunted Meran, Cairo, Corfu. There was no taint of legacy-hunting in her conduct,--heaven forbid such a suspicion! Hm! my brother-in-law Zino christened her the turkey-buzzard. If you owe your piece of news to no more trustworthy source of information, Baroness Stella, I must take the liberty of doubting its correctness."