Page:A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875).djvu/230

224, and very well born. I remember her mother, an old Westphalian Gräfin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the Great's grenadiers. She was poor, however, and her principles were an insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a shabby Jew, twice her own age. He was supposed to have money, but I'm 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 living, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose she is some thirty-four or five years old. 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, but really out-Heroding Herod. No doubt she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast. Since then she has published a lot of stuff, 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 radical theories on matrimony made people think lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against it was probably only