"But the father, the father. Who knows whether he will agree to it?"
"Oh, the father. If the mother gives it, the father is sure to agree. One bread-eater less is always a good thing for such poor people. The poor child, perhaps it will die for want of food, and it would be so well"--she broke off--"isn't it like a dispensation of Providence that just we should come to the Venn, that just we should find it?"
He felt that she was persuading him, and he strove against it in his heart. No, if she allowed herself to be carried away by her feelings in such a manner--she was only a woman--then he, as a man, must subordinate his feelings to common sense.
And he enumerated all the difficulties to her again and again, and finally said to her: "You can't guess what troubles you may be preparing for yourself. If the affection you now think you feel for the child should not last? If he is not congenial to you when he grows older? Bear in mind, he is and will always be the child you have adopted."
But then she had almost flown into a passion. "How can you say such things? Do you think I am narrow-minded? Whether it is my own child or a child I have adopted is quite immaterial, as it becomes mine through its training. I will train it in my own way. That it is of your own flesh and blood has nothing to do with it. Am I only to love a child because I have borne it? Oh no. I love the child because--because it is so small, so innocent, because it must be so extremely sweet when such a helpless little creature stretches out its arms to you." And she spread out her arms and then folded them across her breast, as though she was already holding a child to her heart. "You're a man, you do not understand it. But you are so anxious to make me happy make me happy now. Dear, darling husband, you will very soon forget that it is not our own child, you will soon not remember it any more. It will say 'Father,' 'Mother' to us--and we will be its father and mother."
If she were right! He was silent, thrilled by a strange emotion. And why should she not be right? A child that one trains according to one's own method from its first year, that is removed entirely from the surroundings in which it was born, that does not know but what it is the child of its present parents, that learns to think with their thoughts and feel with their feelings, cannot have anything strange about it any more. It will become part of oneself, will be as dear, as beloved as though one had begotten it oneself.
Pictures arose before his mind's eye which he no longer expected to see, no longer ventured to hope for. He saw his smiling wife with a smiling child on her lap; he saw himself smile, and felt a pride he had never known when he heard its soft childish voice lisp: "Fa-ther." Yes, Käte was right, all the other things that go by the name of happiness are nothing compared to this happiness. Only a father, a mother, knows what joy is.
He kissed his wife, and this kiss already meant half consent; she felt that.
"Let us drive there to-morrow, the first thing to-morrow morning," she implored, in a tone of suppressed rapture.
He endeavoured to remain calm: after they had maturely considered the matter, they would first have to talk it over with their lawyer in Berlin, and other intimate friends.