Aye, and though the image given back to me was (I say it only of that time) a likely enough picture of a lad with short, crisped locks that curled whenever they were wet, cheeks like apples, and skin that hath always been a trouble to me.

For I thought it unmanly and like a girl's.

And that same skin of mine is, perhaps, the reason why all my days I never could abide your buttermilk-and-roses girls, having a supply about me enough to serve a dozen, and therefore thinking but little of their stock-in-trade.
Now in the Wolfmark this is the common kind of beauty--not that beauty of any kind is over-common.

For our maids--especially those of the country--look too much as if they had been made out of wooden pillows such as laborers use to lay their heads on of nights--one large bolster set on the top of two other little ones, and all three well wadded with ticking and feathers.

But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any truth in the old saw.
It was three of the clock and the sun was very fierce on the dusty, unslaked yard of the Wolfsberg, glaring down upon us like the mouth of a wide smelter's oven.