The words sounded diffident, almost submissive, but his heart was swelling with proud delight, and the songsters perched above in the shady recesses of the big plantain tree seemed to have been silent till now, and to be then commencing all at once to twitter and sing and make sweetest melody; and from the terraces beneath there was wafted up to them in fragrant cloudlets the perfume of carnation and mignonette. What a beautiful, divinely beautiful morning it was!
"Henceforth," said Erna, "we will be open to each other, and then such misunderstandings will not occur again. This one, truly, should make me blush. The Baron is the very last man in whom I could take the very slightest interest. I find nearly everything he says stupid and silly, and if a fairly good idea turns up, as it does every now and then, it is impossible to enjoy it, for the question is sure to obtrude itself: 'What nonsense will he talk next?' I am only now making his acquaintance; he, it is true, has been often here before, but in my absence; and in town, when he came, as he sometimes did, to see Aunt Lydia, I always avoided having to meet him."
"You have met few young men yet?"
"And those few have not made me anxious to meet any more."
"This sounds very hard; but, to say the truth, you are not the first girl whom I have heard talk like this."
"My only wonder is that all do not talk, or, at least, think like this. My own idea is, that men are naturally selfish, frivolous, and vain, and only become with advancing years good, and noble, and amiable, and this applies only to the few exceptions; for I suppose the bulk remain as they were."
"Are you serious?"
"Perfectly. And that is why, the night before last, I could not agree with you at all when you asserted that a young girl could not love a much older man, or was at least committing an act of folly if she did so, which, to her sorrow, she was bound to realise sooner or later, and therefore the sooner the better. Nor is it at all this consideration which makes Hilarie change, and which throws her into the arms of that youth who is behaving so childishly and insanely, that Flavio;--there is quite a different reason for it."
"Then you know the novelette?"
"No; I only read it now; and I had to hunt a long time for it, until I found it in the Wanderjahre. The book is lying there. And now I also understand the 'one element,' which you said the night before last that Göthe had excluded, or had not made use of--which is the right expression in this case?--because otherwise the comedy would have been turned into a tragedy."