"You wouldn't have found me there! The baroness--" "Hang her!" interrupted Fritz angrily; "I should like to settle her!" "Ah, I wouldn't mind your doing that now," continued the girl naively; "she treated me very unkindly at the end." "The brute!" said Fritz indignantly.
"Her son--the young baron, you know--came home from the war in January.
He was invalided, but I don't think there was anything the matter with him at all; for, no sooner had he got back to the castle than he began worrying me, paying all sorts of attention and pestering me with his presence." "Puppy!" exclaimed Fritz; "I would have paid him some delicate little attentions if I'd been there!" "Oh, I knew how to treat him," said Madaleine.

"I soon made him keep his distance! But it is the Baroness Stolzenkop that I complain of; she actually taxed me with encouraging him!" "Indeed ?" interrogated Fritz.
"Yes; and, when I told her I wouldn't choose her fop of a son if there wasn't another man in Germany, why she accused me of impertinence, telling me that the fact of my having attracted the young baron was an honour which an humble girl in my position should have been proud of-- she did, really!" "The old cat!" said Fritz indignantly; "I should like to wring her neck for her." "Hush, my son," interposed Madame Dort.

"Pray don't make use of such violent expressions.

The baroness, you know, is exalted in rank, and--" "Then all the greater shame for her to act so dishonourably," he interrupted hotly.

"She ought to be--I can find no words to tell what I would do to her, there!" "Besides, Master Fritz," said old Lorischen, "I won't have you speak so disrespectfully of cats, the noblest animals on earth! Look at Mouser there, looking his indignation at you; can't you see how he feels the reproach of your comparing him to that horrid baroness ?" This remark at once diverted the conversation, all turning in the direction the old nurse pointed, where a little comedy was being enacted.
Mouser--with his tail erected like a stiff bottle-brush, and every individual hair galvanised into a perpendicular position on his back, which was curved into the position of a bent bow with rage and excitement, his whiskers bristling out from each side of his head and his mouth uttering the most horrible anathemas the cat language is capable of--was perched on the back of Madame Dort's arm-chair in the corner; while poor Gelert, the innocent cause of all this display of emotion on Mouser's part, was calmly surveying him and sniffing interrogatory inquiries as to whom he had the pleasure of speaking.