“Yes, he had changed his mind. One could not help modifying one’s views almost daily, because one had to adapt them to the conditions of life which were always changing. And if he had believed in spiritual marriages in the days gone by, he had now come to lose faith in marriages of any sort whatever. That was progress in the direction of radicalism. And as to the spiritual, she was spiritually married to the young ass rather than to him, for they exchanged views on the management of the goods department daily and hourly, while she took no interest at all in the cultivation of forests. Was there anything spiritual in their marriage? Was there?”
“No, not any longer! Her love was dead! He had killed it when he renounced his splendid faith in—the emancipation of women.”
Matters became more and more unbearable. The green forester began to look to his fellow-foresters for companionship and gave up thinking of the goods department and its way of conducting business, matters which he never understood.
“You don’t understand me,” she kept on saying over and over again.
“No, I don’t understand the goods department,” he said.
One night, or rather one morning, he told her that he was going botanising with a girls’ class. He was teaching botany in a girls’ school.
“Oh! indeed! Why had he never mentioned it before? Big girls?”
“Oh! very big ones. From sixteen to twenty.”
“H’m! In the morning?”
“No! In the afternoon! And they would have supper in one of the outlying little villages.”