to call me simply Frau Meier," she said in a whisper, leaning forward and touching Klaus Heinrich's arm with her hand. "The walls have ears, and it is absolutely necessary for me to keep up the incognito I was forced to assume in order to protect myself against the persecution of the odious creatures. You will do what I ask, will you not? Look on it as a joke ... a fad which hurts nobody.… Why not?"
She stopped.
Klaus Heinrich sat upright and braced up in his wicker chair opposite her and looked at her. Before leaving his rectilineal room, he had dressed himself with his valet Neumann's help with all possible care, as his life in the public eye required. His parting ran from over his left eye, straight up to the crown of his head, without a hair sticking up, and his hair was brushed up into a crest off the right side of his forehead. There he sat in his undress uniform, whose high collar and close fit helped him to maintain a composed attitude, the silver epaulettes of a major on his narrow shoulders, leaning slightly but not comfortably forward, collected, calm, with one foot slightly advanced, and with his right hand above his left on his sword-hilt. His young face looked slightly weary from the unreality, the loneliness, strictness, and difficulty of his life; he sat looking at the Countess with a friendly, clear, but composed expression in his eyes.
She stopped. Disenchantment and disgust showed themselves in her features, and, while something like hate towards Klaus Heinrich flamed up in her tired grey eyes, she blushed in the strangest of ways, for one half of her face turned red, the other white. Dropping her eyelids she answered: "I have been living with the Spoelmanns for three years, Royal Highness."
Percival darted forward. Dancing, springing, and wagging his tail he trotted towards his mistress—for Imma
