The appearance, as well as the bearing, of the two ladies offered a sharp contrast. The Professorin's figure was full, and in her face there was a constant expression of wide-awake animation; her hands were round and plump; the Superior was tall and thin, her expression severe and earnest, as if just a moment before she had given some positive order, or was on the point of giving one; her hands were long and perfectly shaped. Both women had experienced hard trials: the Professorin had won a gentle, smiling content; the Superior, a complete preparation to meet all events with firm and stoical endurance.
The first greeting between these early friends, after nearly thirty years of separation, had been a strange one, the Superior not hearing, or seeming not to hear, that Frau Dournay addressed her just as she had in the old days.
"I did not think I should ever see you again in this world," she had said directly, and when the Professorin tried to recall reminiscences of their youth, she had replied that she knew the past no longer; she had destroyed all its mementoes, and recognized only a future, the sole object that ought to occupy our thoughts.
The Superior noticed that this distant manner of speaking startled her old friend, and she said, with the same composure, that she made no distinction among the relations and acquaintances of her early life; no one was nearer to her or farther from her, and that any one who could not attain this state ought not to devote herself to a spiritual life.
The Professorin felt as if she had been turned off and shown out of the house, but she was calm enough to say:—
"Yes, you always had a strength of mind which used to frighten me, but now I admire it."
The Superior smiled; then, as if angry at having been betrayed into any self-satisfaction by this civil speech, she said,—
"Dear Clara, I beg you not to tempt me into vanity. I stand at my post, and have a strict watch to keep, until the Lord of Hosts shall call me to himself. Formerly, I must confess, I did not realize that you and I lived in different worlds; in mine, it is one's duty not to rely on one's own strength."
With all this self-denial, it seemed to the Professorin that the Superior spoke of the power and the greatness of the sphere in which she moved, with that pride, or at least with that lofty self-confidence, shown by all who belong to a great and powerful community. To the Superior, on the other hand, she seemed like an isolated, detached atom, floating it knew not whither.
They soon found, however, a point on which they could sympathize, in speaking of the difficult task of educating the young.