Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/21

 I had just had the opportunity of wondering at the lack of taste shown in this respect. She, however, wore a small, toque-shaped, straw hat, bound with blue velvet, and a silver-grey veil.

To wear a nice veil at a time when veils are out of fashion always shows good taste on the part of the lady, and a pardonable desire to please. I cannot imagine the adored one without a veil, this festive streamer on life's billows, always pointing the direction one is to follow, and always making the heart beat, though sometimes leading astray. Well, I am speaking as if I had already fallen in love, which I had not at the time, though when is one not liable to do so? The world of women is for us divided into two classes: the one with whom it is more or less possible to fall in love, and the other in which one feels as if in the society of men. This time I was surely enough in the society of the former class.

We had gone some distance before I had come to this conclusion, for I only now and then dared to glance at her. All the same, I looked perhaps more often than would be considered correct; at any rate I noticed that she blushed deeply, and bent still farther down over the book, which was by no means of a size to shield her.

This little dumpy book began to make me inquisitive, with the real, travelling, rainy-weather inquisitiveness, that may be aroused by any casual circumstance. Old German translations of Cooper and Walter Scott are usually of a similar size, and I had already judged her literature to belong to this respectable type, when a sudden turning of the leaves revealed that it belonged to an even more serious order—it was a pocket dictionary.

This discovery increased still more my interest in the girl, and I looked at her with a certain emotion, picturing how