"Ah, if I only were the bird up there in the air!"
The mother made no answer, and Manna continued:—
"I see everything to-day for the first time; there is the Rhine, there are the mountains, there the houses, there the men; a bird of passage,—yes, one that has been hatched in Asia.—is coming towards us, towards you. I am really so sorrowful, so sad; and still there is something within me singing lustily and singing always; 'Thou art merry, do not seek to be otherwise.' Ah, mother, it is dreadfully sinful to be as I am."
"No, my child, you are still a child, and a child, they say, has smiles and tears in the same bag. Rejoice that you are so young; perhaps something of childhood has been repressed in you, and now it is coming out. No one can say when, and no one can say where. We take things too hard altogether; things are not quite so frightful as we women imagine. I am quite cheerful since the Doctor was here. We may become accustomed to look at everything in a gloomy way; then it is well if some one comes and says: 'But just see the world is neither so wicked not so good as we persuade ourselves it! is, and things run on either well or ill, and not in their logical course.' My blessed husband said that many and many a time."
Manna seemed not to have heard what the Mother said; she exclaimed in a merry tone:—
"At this moment we are all ennobled, and still I do not perceive anything of the nobility in me, and yet one ought to be able to perceive something."
There was an unusually light-hearted tone in everything she said, and she continued:—
"Tell me now, how did you feel on the day you laid aside your nobility?"
"No trace of sorrow; it only pained me when my lady friends assured me strongly that they would always remain the same to me; and in this very assurance lay the conviction that it was otherwise; and they were all the time telling me how they had loved me, as if I were no longer living, and indeed to many I was already dead, for to them a human being that has lost the rank of noble, is, as it were, sunk into the realm of the departed spirits."
The Mother and Manna sat trustfully beside each other; for a time every sorrow was forgotten, every care, every anxiety.