"'"What's the matter with you? Please calm yourself, dear Mr. Marzell, you're in a state which terrifies me."
"'I repeated all I had said before, more coherently however. Then Pauline said:
"'"But how did you ever get it in your head that I'm in love with anybody, or engaged to be married? There's not a word of truth in either the one story or the other, I can assure you."
"'I maintained, on the other hand, that I had been quite certain ever since the first moment I had set eyes on her that she was in love; and as she kept pressing me to explain more clearly, I told her the whole story of that first Monday of ours in the Webersche Zelt. Scarcely had I finished it when Pauline got up and danced about the room with shouts of laughter, crying:
"'"Oh! good gracious! It's too delicious altogether! Well! what dreams! what ludicrous absurdities to take in one's head! Oh! I never heard anything like it! it's really beyond everything!"
"'I sat nonplussed; Pauline came back to me, took me by the hands, and shook me by them, as one does to rouse a person from a deep sleep.
"'"Now please to listen to what I'm going to tell you," she said, trying hard, but not very successfully, to restrain her laughter. "The young man whom you took for a messenger of love was a shopman from Bramigk, the draper's; the note he gave me was from Bramigk himself. He, like the most charming and courteous of shopkeepers as he is, had promised to get me a hat from Paris (I had admired the pattern when I saw it), and to let me know as soon as it arrived. I wanted it particularly to wear the evening of that Whit Monday when we were all in the Webersche Zelt. I wanted to put it on to go to a singing tea in; you know what we call a singing tea here? A place where people sing in order to drink tea, and drink tea for the purpose of singing. Very well! The hat had come, but it was so badly made that it had to be all altered before I could wear it. This was the fatal news that made me shed a tear or two. I didn't want my father to see that it had made me cry, but he soon found out what I was vexed about, and chaffed me unmercifully on the subject. You know I have a habit of holding my handkerchief to my face, as I did that day, when anything annoys me?"