Excerpt from A Woman-Hater: A Novel
"The Golden Star," Homburg, was a humble hotel, not used by gay gamblers, but by modest travelers.
At two o'clock, one fine day in Tune, there were two strangers in the salle a manger, seated at small tables a long way apart, and wholly absorbed in their own business.
One was a lady about twenty-four years old, who, in the present repose of her features, looked comely, sedate, and womanly, but not the remarkable person she really was. Her forehead high and white, but a little broader than sculptors affect; her long hair, coiled tight, in a great many smooth snakes, upon her snowy nape, was almost flaxen, yet her eyebrows and long lashes not pale hut a reddish brown; her gray eyes large and profound; her month rather large, beautifully shaped, amiable, and expressive, hut full of resolution: her chin a little broad; her neck and hands admirably white and polished. She was an Anglo-Dane-her father English.
If you ask me what she was doing, why-hunting; and had been, for some days, in all the inns of Homburg. Site had the visitors' book, and was going through the names of the whole year, and studying each to see whether it looked teal or assumed. Interspersed were flippant comments, and verses adapted to draw n smile of amusement or contempt; but this limiter passed them all over as nullities; the steady pose of her head, the glint of her deep eye, and the set of her line lips showed a soul not to be diverted from its object.
The traveler at her back had a map of the district and blank telegrams, one of which he filled in even' now and then, and scribbled a hasty letter to the same address. He was a sharp-faced midde-aged man of business; Joseph Ashmead, operatic mid theatrical agent - at his wits' end; a female singer at the Homburg Opera had fallen really ill; he was commissioned to replace her, and had only thirty hours to do it in. So lie was hunting a singer. What the lady was hunting can never he known, unless she should choose to reveal it.
Karl, the waiter, felt hound to rouse these abstracted guests, and stimulate their appetites, he affected, therefore, to look on them as people who had not yet breakfasted, and tripped up to Mr. Ashnead with a bill of fare, rather scanty.
The busiest Englishman can eat, And Ashmead had no objection to match a mouthful; lie gave his order in German with an English accent. But the lady, when appealed to, said softly, in pure German, "I will wait for the table-d'hote."
"The table-d'hote.! It wants four hours to that."
The lady looked Karl full in the face, and said, slowly, and very distinctly, "Then, I - will - wait - four - hours."
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