I don't know how you'd sleep, how you'd eat.«

»With your permission I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and chairs. C'est la moindre des choses and the affair of an hour or two. I know a little man from whom I can hire for a trifle what I should so briefly want, what I should use; my gondolier can bring the things round in his boat. Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and my servant, who's a wonderfully handy fellow« – this personage was an evocation of the moment – »can easily cook me a chop there. My tastes and habits are of the simplest: I live on flowers!« And then I ventured to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they should let their rooms. They were bad economists – I had never heard of such a waste of material.

I saw in a moment my good lady had never before been spoken to in any such fashion – with a humorous firmness that did n't exclude sympathy, that was quite founded on it. She might easily have told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this by good fortune did n't occur to her. I left her with the understanding that she would submit the question to her aunt and that I might come back the next day for their decision.

»The aunt will refuse; she'll think the whole proceeding very louche!« Mrs. Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my place in her gondola. She had put the idea into my head and now – so little are women to be counted on – she appeared to take a despondent view of it. Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes; I went so far as to boast of a distinct prevision of success. Upon this Mrs. Prest broke out: »Oh I see what's in your head! You fancy you've made such an impression in five minutes that she's dying for you to come and can be depended on to bring the old one round. If you do get in you'll count it as a triumph.«

I did count it as a triumph, but only for the commentator – in the last analysis – not for the man, who had not the tradition of personal conquest. When I went back on the morrow the little maid-servant conducted me straight through the long sala – it opened there as before in large perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good omen – into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had emerged on that occasion. It was a spacious shabby parlour with a fine old painted ceiling under which a strange figure sat alone at one of the windows. They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive states marking my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics. I grew used to her afterwards, though never completely; but as she sat there before me my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit. Her presence seemed somehow to contain and express his own, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since. Yes, I remember my emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor that took me when I saw the niece not to be there. With her, the day before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my courage – much as I had longed for the event – to be left alone with so terrible a relic as the aunt. She was too strange, too literally resurgent. Then came a check from the perception that we were n't really face to face, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade which served for her almost as a mask. I believed for the instant that she had put it on expressly, so that from underneath it she might take me all in without my getting at herself. At the same time it created a presumption of some ghastly death's-head lurking behind it. The divine Juliana as a grinning skull – the vision hung there until it passed. Then it came to me that she was tremendously old – so old that death might take her at any moment, before I should have time to compass my end. The next thought was a correction to that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week, she would die to-morrow – then I could pounce on her possessions and ransack her drawers. Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking.