"My father's house a ruin, my brother a shadow--worse, a caricature--of his former self. Ah, my friend, the hammer-theory had shown itself cruel to its staunchest maintainer. How had the clumsy anvil beaten out the delicate hammer! How ignoble he had grown in the common world which he so deeply despised! 'Only despise reason and knowledge,' Goethe makes the Spirit of Lies say, 'and I have you then safe.' And I say, only despise men, and you will see how soon you grow despicable to others and to yourself.
"I told him why I had come; he led me in silence into the park, and pointed to a woman, who, in a fantastic dress, flowers and weeds in her glossy-black, half-dishevelled hair, in her hands a guitar with half its chords broken, was wandering under the trees and among the shrubbery, sometimes raising her dark eyes, as if in ecstacy, to heaven, and again dropping them, as in despair, to the earth.
"'You see,' he said, 'it is a lie that I have imprisoned her. Many another would do it, for it is not a pleasant thing to afford the public such an exhibition.'
"Take her to her native place," I said.
"'Try it,' he answered. 'She would leap out of the carriage; she would throw herself into the sea. And if you took her there in fetters and by force, what would be her fate? She would be thrown into the dungeon of a convent, where they would try with hunger and blows to exorcize the devil who tempted her to give her heart to a heretic. Though I love her no longer, I once loved her, or at least she has been mine; and no priest's ungentle hand shall touch what has once belonged to me.'
"I said how terrible it was to hear him speak thus of his wife, the mother of his child.
"'Who says that she is my wife?' was his reply.
"I looked at him amazed and shocked; he shrugged his shoulders.
"'That does not suit your citizen virtue,' he said. 'I would have made her Frau von Zehren, notwithstanding her father is a hidalgo of very doubtful lineage, had the child been a boy. What do I want with a girl? She cannot continue our race; let it then end with me.'
"It was indifferent to him whether these words wounded me or not; he had no desire to wound me; he really looked upon the superintendent of a prison, who had married a poor painter's daughter, as not a Zehren.