" She was much admired for her stately beauty and her
style, and if the young people of that free and easy community were at
times inclined to resent a manifest difference, they succumbed to her
magnetism, and respected her obvious devotion to a high literary ideal.
It was during her second winter that she met Georg Zottmyer.
He was a tall, narrow, angular young man with a small clipped head and
preeminent ears. His narrow face was set with narrower features, and his
eyes were very bright, and the windows of his conceit. Although his
income was minute he boasted a father of note in the University of
Leipzig, and his mother had traveled and written a scathing satire on
the United States of America. He had not a grain of originality or
imagination, but he too was taking the course in dramatic art, and
reading for that degree without whose magic letters he could not hope to
take his place in the world of art to which his parts entitled him. He
met Gisela in the lecture room and immediately became her cavalier.
At first Gisela endeavored to get rid of him by an icy front, but this
he took for feminine coquetry and his own front was serene. As he had
made up his mind to be a dramatist merely because the career appealed
acutely to his itching ambition, so did he in due course make up his
mind to marry this handsome brunette (what hair he had was drab) who
bore all the earmarks of secret wealth in spite of the fact that she
lived in a small hotel.
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