Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious Jew, twice her own age.  He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young wife spent it very fast.  She has been a widow these six or eight years, and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion.  I suppose she is some six or eight and thirty years of age.  In winter one hears of her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden.  She’s very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her.  A year after her marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the George Sand manner—­beating the drum to Madame Sand’s trumpet.  No doubt she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast.  Since then she has published a lot of literature—­novels and poems and pamphlets on every conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian philosophy.  Her talk is much better than her writing.  Her conjugophobia—­I can’t call it by any other name—­made people think lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against marriage was probably only theoretic.  She had a taste for spinning fine phrases, she drove her shuttle, and when she came to the end of her yarn she found that society had turned its back.  She tossed her head, declared that at last she could breathe the sacred air of freedom, and formally announced that she had embraced an ‘intellectual’ life.  This meant unlimited camaraderie with scribblers and daubers, Hegelian philosophers and Hungarian pianists.  But she has been admired also by a great many really clever men; there was a time, in fact, when she turned a head as well set on its shoulders as this one!” And Niedermeyer tapped his forehead.  “She has a great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her.  Yet for all that, I am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box.  I am going to leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe the omission, that I too have gone over to the Philistines.  It’s not that; it is that there is something sinister about the woman.  I am too old for it to frighten me, but I am good-natured enough for it to pain me.  Her quarrel with society has brought her no happiness, and her outward charm is only the mask of a dangerous discontent.  Her imagination is lodged where her heart should be!  So long as you amuse it, well and good; she’s radiant.  But the moment you let it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a pang.  If you land on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but there have been two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their necks in the fall.”

“You are reversing your promise,” I said, “and giving me an opinion, but not an anecdote.”