"What I desire is presumptuous!" he continued. "How can you help me? What I have wasted, I have wasted——I must wait for new and better days."
"What have you wasted?" Johanna asked.
"Opportunities to gain excellence, happiness,—and you!" he replied. "From the first moment of our acquaintance I knew what you could be to me, but, instead of testifying this to you, I have squandered my days, from folly, from habit——" Here he glanced towards Magelone.
Johanna was pained. "Why will you deny——" she began.
Otto interrupted her:
"I deny nothing. I am only trying to explain to you—and, as for that, to myself also—what is going on within me. You have often heard the vanity of men bewailed, but not nearly enough, believe me. Against our better selves, against the demands of our hearts, it gives us over hopelessly into the power of every coquette who knows how to flatter this same vanity. Coquetry itself is a flattery that we are powerless to withstand. Yet how often, while we lie spell-bound, does our soul thirst, and thirsting perish, unless true love comes to succor it!"
Johanna's heart beat tumultuously, but she tried to appear at her ease, and said with a smile, and without looking up from her work,—
"Poor true love! How is it to manage if it does not know how to coquette?"
"No need of that!" Otto rejoined, passionately. "It only needs to show itself simply and seriously for what it is, to bring to shame all the spells of sorcery. Believe me, Johanna, if I could ever find it,—and a single look, a single tone, would reveal it to me,—I should be liberated forever."
He had taken hold of the end of her embroidery, thus obliging her to drop her hands in her lap, but she did not venture to speak or to look up at him.