"Like an old, old woman from Grimm's Fairy Tales, who at the proper time changes into a beautiful princess!"
"That is it--she has a wonderful fire in her deep-sunk eyes. She always looks to me as if her old face was only a mask under which she hides a youthful soul."
"So it is in reality," said Oswald, and he told the doctor the strange conversation he had had with Mother Claus the day before on the heath, and how her words had appeared to him as natural and truthful as the song of the lark on the heath, and how little he had been pleased afterwards with the sermon of the self-sufficient preacher.
"Yes indeed," said the doctor. "There is truth in Goethe's words: It annoys men to find the truth so simple. They always try to make people believe truth is a marvel, a great wonder, and therefore they adorn it with all kinds of gay rags and fragments, and then carry it about in procession; while such people, like our old woman, read only one chapter in the great book of the universe, but they read it again and again, for sixty, seventy years, till they know it by heart. And as the whole book is but one great revelation, they learn in the end just as much as the great crowd of partially learned men, who turn in restless haste leaf after leaf, pick out a little here and a little there, and are finally about as wise or as stupid as they were before."
"Yes indeed," said Oswald; "a striking proof of the justness of your remark is, for instance, the Baroness Grenwitz. What has she not read! German, French, English, and Swedish; sacred books and profane books; the best and the worst books. To-day I find her reading Rousseau's Confessions, to-morrow a catchpenny novel; to-day she studies Schleiermacher's religious discourses, to-morrow she is deep in the last horror by Dumas or Eugene Sue. In small matters she has good sense enough, but as soon as you approach the higher mysteries of our life here below, or as soon even as the question arises how a general conclusion can be obtained from the mass of details, she begins to talk nonsense, and produces such foolish aristocratic commonplace phrases that my head swims."
"This tendency of the baroness, I should think, does not serve to make your position in Grenwitz very pleasant?"
"Not exactly," replied Oswald, lightly; "but I try to weaken the addition of wormwood by avoiding as much as I can the philosophical effusions of the baroness, and by confining my intercourse with the family generally to the least possible frequency."
"But with all consideration to your time and your disposition, might you not have fixed these limits a little too narrow?" said the doctor, knocking off the ashes of his cigar.
"How so?" asked Oswald, not without some surprise.
"You will pardon my indiscretion," said the other, turning more fully towards Oswald, so as to look at him with his bright intelligent eyes. "You know that physicians are condemned to play the disagreeable part of confidential friends in the families in which they practise. At one or the other point, everything in life is, after all, closely connected with our body, and as we have the control of that part of our patients, we gradually are made judges of everything, even of such things which seem to belong before any other forum rather than that of the physician. And even if there happens to be no connection whatever between the two questions of soul and of body, the patient is very apt to think: If you have told him so much you may just as well tell him a little more. Thus the baroness could not help telling me to-day--I am not going to flatter you or to annoy you, but only to give you a hint, which you may follow or not, just as you like--that you, who possessed such a very great gift to make yourself agreeable, and who could, if you chose, be so perfectly at home in well-bred society, were rather disposed to make no use of these talents. She regretted this all the more, she added, as this reserve caused a great loss to Malte, who was by nature a domestic boy and never so happy as in the family circle, and who now could not enjoy the privileges which he would otherwise derive from being in your society and becoming intimate with you."