"It is strange that while Captain Schmidt, here, in that decided tone which only conviction gives, is prophesying to us a storm, which our kind host, to whom certainly it would come nearest, would prefer to remove into the land of fancy--it is strange that I have been reminded at every word of another storm----"
"Another!" cried Meta.
"Another storm, my dear young lady, and of quite another sort; I need not tell these gentlemen of what sort. In this case also the usual course of affairs has been in the most unexpected manner interrupted, and there has been an accumulation of waters, flowing in immense streams of gold, ladies, from west to east. In this case also the wise men prophesy that such an unnatural state of affairs cannot be of long continuance; that it has already lasted its time, that an ebb must soon come, a reaction, a storm, which--to preserve the image which so strikingly applies to the matter--will, like the other, come upon us, destroying, overwhelming everything, and with its troubled and barren waters cover the ground, on which men believed their riches and power to be for ever established."
In his eagerness to give another turn to the conversation, and in the pleasure of his happy comparison, the President had not considered that the topic was still the same, and that it must be more unpleasant to the Count in this new phase than in the former one. He became aware of his thoughtlessness when the Count, in a tone that trembled with agitation, exclaimed:
"I hope, President, that you do not confound our plan, dictated, I may say, by the purest patriotism, with the enterprises so much in favour nowaday, which mostly have no other source than the vulgarest greed of gain."
"My dear Count! how can you suppose that I could even dream of such a thing!" exclaimed the President.
The Count bowed. "Thank you," said he, "for I confess that nothing would hurt my feelings more. I have always considered it as a political necessity, and a proof of his eminently statesmanlike capacity, that Prince Bismarck has made use of certain means for carrying out his great ideas, which he certainly would have preferred not using, if only to avoid too close contact with persons, all intercourse with whom must have been formerly thoroughly distasteful to him. I consider it also as a necessary consequence of this misfortune, that in order to reward these persons he has inaugurated, has been obliged to inaugurate, the new era of speculators, and of immoderate greed of gain, with those fatal milliards. Meanwhile----"
"Excuse my interrupting you," said the General; "I consider these compacts of the Prince's with those persons, parties, strata of population, classes of society--call them what you will--as you do. Count Golm, most certainly a misfortune, but by no means a necessary one. On the contrary; the rocher de bronze, upon which the Prussian kingdom is established, formed as it was of a loyal aristocracy, a zealous body of officials, a faithful army--all these were strong enough to support the German Empire, if it must needs be German rather than Prussian, or indeed an empire at all."
"Yes, General, it had need to be, and to be German," said Reinhold.
The General shot a dark look at the young man from under his bushy eyebrows; but he had listened before with satisfaction to his explanations, and felt that he must let him speak now, when he disagreed with him.