There appeared to be a sympathetic attraction between Bella and Sonnenkamp's speculative and daring spirit. Clodwig considerately added,—
"I have often noticed, that so long as a man is accumulating wealth, his prosperity seems to give universal satisfaction; men feel pleased, as if they were accumulating too. But when he has attained his end, they turn round and find fault, where before they had commended. Do you understand anything of horticulture?"
"No."
"Herr Sonnenkamp is a very considerable horticulturist. Is it not strange that in the laying out of parks we have wholly supplanted the formal methods of French gardening, which now turn to the culture of fruit, and find encouragement in the pecuniary profit that governs all such operations? The English excel in swine-raising, their swine being fat sides of bacon with four feet attached; the French, on the other hand, having taken to fruit culture, have succeeded in producing fabulous crops.
"Yes!" he concluded, smiling, "Herr Sonnenkamp is a tree-tutor, and, moreover, a tyrannical tree-trimmer. To-day I can speak out more freely. Sonnenkamp has always been, and will always be, a stranger to me.
"Through all his external polish, and an increasing attention to the cultivation of good manners, a sort of brutishness appears in him, I mean brutishness in its original meaning of an uncultivated state of nature."
"Yes," Bella remarked, "you will have a difficult position, and especially with Roland."
"With Roland?" asked Eric.
"Yes, that is the boy's name. He would like to know much, and learn nothing."
Bella looked round pleased with her clever saying. The parrot in his great cage upon the veranda uttered shrill cries as if scolding. As she rose, Bella said, "There you see my tyrant; a scholar who tyrannises over his teacher in a most shocking manner."