He was so handsome, he spoke so charmingly! She thought it astonishing that any one should not love him, just because his admiration was mingled with so much shyness.
She herself was much too insignificant a person to think of loving him, and beside, he was not free, and it would have been a sin to think of the man who was engaged to her friend.

This enthusiasm for Wilhelm naturally did not escape Paul's notice, but it did not disquiet him, because he took into account Malvine's nature.

"It is a harmless fancy," he said to himself, "the sort of fancy girls take sometimes for princes whose photographs they see in shop-windows, or for actors whom they have admired as Don Carlos or Romeo; later on they laugh over their childish folly, and these fancies never prevent the pretty enthusiast from marrying and being happy." Nevertheless, things became suspiciously different after the breach between Wilhelm and Loulou.

In Malvine's somewhat narrow but well-regulated mind a brave romance had been mistakenly built up.

Now Wilhelm was free: now she need have no feeling of duty on account of that superficial, pleasure-seeking Loulou, who had never been worthy of him.