"I have never been young."
"O my gracious lady, you are still young, and you never looked better than you do now."
"Do you think so?" said Bella, throwing back her head, for a voice within her said: Why shouldest thou not be also young for once? Thou art! Thou art what thou canst not help being; and let the world be what it must be too.
Leaving the house, she went around the garden, seeming to herself to be a captive. Unconsciously she went into the room on the ground-floor, and as she stood near the unearthed antiquities, a voice within her said:—
"What are all these? What are these vessels? Lava-ashes! all ashes! What is all this antiquarian rummaging? What is the use of this picking up of old buried trash, this perpetual thinking and talking about humanity and progress? all foreign, dead, a conversation over a death-bed; nothing but distraction, forgetfulness; no life, no hope, no future; never towards the day, always towards the night,—the night of the past, and the ideal of humanity. But I am not the past, I am not an ideal of humanity. I am the to-day, I will be the today. Ah me, where am I!" She went into the garden, and watched two butterflies hovering hither and thither in the air, now alighting upon the flowers, now coming together, separating again, and again uniting.
"This is life!" was the cry within her. "This is life! they grub up no ancient relics, they live with no antiquities."
Then came a swallow darting down, seized one of the butterflies, and vanished.
What is thy life to thee now, thou poor butterfly?
Below, over the Rhine, clouds of smoke from the steamboats were floating in the air, and Bella thought:—
"If one could only thus fly away! What do we here? We heat with our blood this dead earth, so that it may have some little life. Our life-breath is nothing but a puff of vapor that mingles with thousands of other vaporous films; this we call life, and it vanishes like the thousands-—-"