After Franka had finished reading this letter, she tore it into tiny bits, and, laying them on the pale-yellow velvet of the jewel-case next the glittering stones, made the whole into a package, which she carefully tied up and sealed; and, after addressing it to Baron Ludwig Malhof, hastened to mail it at the nearest post-office station without taking a moment’s time for consideration. She felt a keen satisfaction in flinging the gift and the letter down at the feet of her insulter. On receiving them back, he would redden with shame as if he had been struck by the riding-whip of an angry queen.
Or would he not rather laugh at her for her “virtuous pose,” for her “moral Philistinism”? Franka was conscious that it was not a conventional “virtue” which had stimulated her impulsive action, but a mixture of one tenth sense of honor and nine tenths aversion.... She was not quite ignorant as regards the mysteries of love, although she had so far had no love-affairs. Her father had delicately initiated her, through studies of plants and animals, into the secrets of the transmission of life, and her comprehensive reading, begun when she was a little child,—the poets, somewhat later the German, French, and English novelists,—had given her an insight into the whole world of passion,—into the tragedies and joys, the sorrows and dreams, of love; also into the crimes and baseness, the ardent happiness and the depths of despair, which are found in the domain of sex, and, on the whole, she had a boundlessly high ideal of love. Perhaps for the very reason that hitherto she had found no one to inspire this feeling in her soul, because no little adventures and gleams of romance had disillusioned her, her ideas and presentiments, if by chance they swept into this domain, were so high-strung.
A love union and paradise were to her two similar conceptions. A pure fountain of devoted tenderness and a glowing hearth of passionate yearnings were concealed in her inmost being, still panoplied round with virgin austerity, with a delicate, flower-like terror of any impure touch. If ever she bestowed the treasure of her love, it would be for the recipient and for herself a sacred moment of the loftiest bliss.
And the idea of her throwing herself away for money, for clothes, for precious stones,—and instead of highest rapture to feel only deepest repulsion,—to endure the embraces of that old satyr, the kisses of a shriveled, detestable mouth.... No! Sooner die! And should Fate never offer her the possibility of giving that treasure to one truly beloved, then were it better sunk in the depths of the sea! That hateful creature had written something about a horn of plenty filled with joys—yes, she possessed such a one to pour out upon the dear life that would be united with hers.... No; that should not be wasted and shattered!
The next day, as Baron Malhof was preparing to go and get his answer from the young girl, an answer which he did not doubt would be favorable, though perhaps awkwardly expressed, he was interrupted in the midst of his fastidious toilet by the arrival of the package. After he had opened it, he hissed out two words which expressed his whole sense of disgust:—“Stupid goose!”
Several weeks elapsed, and still no situation offered. Now Franka was constrained to sell her books in order to exist for a time—and what an existence! She was standing in front of the bookcase, selecting the volumes which for the time being she still felt unable to part with; she intended to lay these aside so that the second-hand dealer whom she had summoned might not see them.
Tears stood in her eyes, for to her it was a great and painful sacrifice. She would have preferred to keep them all, for almost every one of those volumes was associated in her memory with joyous, soul-stimulating hours—all of Goethe, all of Shakespeare, Byron, Victor Hugo, and other classics of universal literature. They must all go—these good spirits which had with their magical pictures glorified so many winter evenings for the two solitaries! Also, away with the thick-bodied works of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Schopenhauer; away with the works of history and the encyclopædias; away with the whole rows of modern fiction.
Only a shelf-full of scientific books by contemporaneous authors,—scientists, thinkers, and stylists at the same time,—Bölsche, Bruno Wille, Herbert Spencer, Emerson, Anatole France, Haeckel, Ernst Mach, Friedrich Jodl, and a few others,—these she would keep and take with her and plunge into again in order to get edification from the remembrance of the unforgettable words which her father had spoken to her when they were reading them together.
“Child, these are revelations! What the human mind—which is certainly a part of God—has gradually glimpsed at and recognized—is the disclosure of the Highest, and therefore is what men call Revelation. In astonishment and awe we are learning things of which our fathers and the majority of our contemporaries had no suspicion. We are penetrating into mysteries which bring before our eyes the grandeur of the universe and its infinities and which still remain mysteries—for our consciousness only perceives but does not comprehend them. We are standing on the threshold of perfectly new apperceptions, and so at the threshold of a wholly new epoch: fortunate are we who are to live in this twentieth century. It is the cradle of some new-born thing destined to the most glorious development. What will it be called? No one as yet knows; only posterity will find a name for it.
“Child, approach these revelations with a religious mind. You know what I call ‘religious’: to have the sense of reverence, to know that there are sublime things as yet unknown; to wish to be worthy of the greatness and the goodness that everywhere prevails and therefore to be good one’s self. Now, perhaps you may ask what I mean by ‘good’? There is no end in the chain of definitions;—do not always try to explain, but rather to feel, and then you have the right thing....”