"I am confounded," said the Professorin. "With all her culture, how were such things possible?"
"That was just it," broke in the Doctor delighted. "All this intellectual life was nothing to Frau Bella: she found herself in it, she knew not how. She had to destroy something, or what would she have done with all this culture? Formerly there was hypocrisy only in religion; now there is hypocrisy in education. But, no: Frau Bella was no hypocrite, neither was she really ill-natured; she was simply crude."
"Crude?"
"Yes. Thought of others educates at once the heart and the mind; Frau Bella thought only and always of herself; of what she had to say and to feel."
"Do you think," asked the Professorin with some hesitation, "that these two persons can be happy together for a single hour?"
"Certainly not, according to our ideas of happiness. They have no real affection for each other: pride and disappointment, and a desire to shock the world, have induced them to make their escape together. There is one other motive which persons like us cannot enter into. I tried for a long time to discover it, and believe at last that I have succeeded: it is the consciousness of beauty. I am a beauty: that is a principle on which a whole system is founded. Other people are only made for the purpose of seeing and admiring the beauty. Bella committed an act of treason against herself when she married Clodwig: she could not have done it except in a moment of forgetfulness of this great principle. But how can we judge such people aright? The longer I live, the more clearly I see that human beings are not alike: they are of different species."
"You want to provoke us by heresies."
"By no means: that is the reason why this anti-slavery fever is distasteful to me. This claiming equality for all men is a wrong."
"A wrong?"
"Yes. Men are not all the same kind of beings; one is a nightingale that sings on a tree; another is a frog that croaks in the marsh. Now, to require of the frog that he should sing up in a tree is a wrong, a perversion of Nature. Let the frog alone in his marsh, he is very well off there, and to him and his wife his song sounds as sweet as that of the bird to his mate. Men are of different kinds."