But an unmarried woman of thirty-five, a German, took compassion on the unhappy man. She spent many hours with him in a lonely summer arbour in the park, discussing the problems of life. She was a member of a big evangelical society, whose object was the raising of the moral standard. She showed him prospectuses for newspapers and magazines, the principal mission of which was the suppression of prostitution.
“Look at me,” she said, “I am thirty-five years old and enjoy excellent health! What fools’ talk it is to say that immorality is a necessary evil. I have watched and fought a good fight for Christ’s sake.”
The young clergyman silently compared her well-developed figure, her large hips, with his own wasted body.
“What a difference there is between human beings in this world,” was his unspoken comment.
In the autumn the Rev. Theodore Wennerstroem and Sophia Leidschütz, spinster, were engaged to be married.
“Saved!” sighed the father, when the news reached him in his house at Stockholm.
“I wonder how it will end,” thought the brother in his barracks. “I’m afraid that my poor Theodore is ‘one of those Asra who die when they love.’”
Theodore Wennerstroem was married. Nine months after the wedding his wife presented him with a boy who suffered from rickets—another thirteen months and Theodore Wennerstroem had breathed his last.
The doctor who filled up the certificate of death, looked at the fine healthy woman, who stood weeping by the small coffin which contained the skeleton of her young husband of not much over twenty years.
“The plus was too great, the minus too small,” he thought, “and therefore the plus devoured the minus.”