One may perhaps suppose that such behavior must have caused some uneasiness to her bridegroom.  But, in fact, it was quite the reverse.  He admired her exceedingly for her exertions, and he had the more reason for feeling entirely satisfied about her, as she had certain features in her character almost in excess, which kept anything in the slightest degree dangerous utterly at a distance.  She would run about with anybody, just as she fancied; no one was free from danger of a push or a pull, or of being made the object of some sort of freak.  But no person ever ventured to do the same to her; no person dared to touch her, or return, in the remotest degree, any liberty which she had taken herself.  She kept every one within the strictest barriers of propriety in their behavior to herself, while she, in her own behavior, was every moment overleaping them.

On the whole, one might have supposed it had been a maxim with her to expose herself indifferently to praise or blame, to regard or to dislike.  If in many ways she took pains to gain people, she commonly herself spoiled all the good she had done, by an ill tongue, which spared no one.  Not a visit was ever paid in the neighborhood, not a single piece of hospitality was ever shown to herself and her party among the surrounding castles or mansions, but what, on her return, her excessive recklessness let it appear that all men and all human things she was only inclined to see on the ridiculous side.

There were three brothers who, purely out of compliment to one another, kept up a good-natured and urbane controversy as to which should marry first, had been overtaken by old age before they had got the question settled; here was a little young wife with a great old husband; there, on the other hand, was a dapper little man and an unwieldy giantess.  In one house, every step one took one stumbled over a child; another, however many people were crammed into it, never would seem full, because there were no children there at all.  Old husbands (supposing the estate was not entailed) should get themselves buried as quickly as possible, that such a thing as a laugh might be heard again in the house.  Young married people should travel:  housekeeping did not sit well upon them.  And as she treated the persons, so she treated what belonged to them; their houses, their furniture, their dinner-services—­everything.  The ornaments of the walls of the rooms most particularly provoked her saucy remarks.  From the oldest tapestry to the most modern printed paper; from the noblest family pictures to the most frivolous new copper-plate:  one as well as the other had to suffer—­one as well as the other had to be pulled in pieces by her satirical tongue, so that, indeed, one had to wonder how, for twenty miles round, anything continued to exist.

It was not, perhaps, exactly malice which produced all this destructiveness; wilfulness and selfishness were what ordinarily set her off upon it:  but a genuine bitterness grew up in her feelings toward Ottilie.