"It does for me. I am an old man; I may die to-morrow."
"You have said so these ten years."
"If I have said so for ten years," replied the baron, deeply offended by the indifference which lay in the words of his wife, "it is because I have not had a well day for ten years; and one of these days the morning will break when I am no more, and that is why I should like to have my daughter near me again as soon as possible."
"And of your son you say nothing; you do not mind whether Malte is well or unwell. And yet it is Malte in whom all our hopes are centring. You ought to thank God that you have a son who can inherit the estate; instead of that it is Helen, and all the time Helen, whom you consider as all-important."
"I thank God that I have a son, and I thank you that you have given me a son; not because he is my heir, but because he is my flesh and blood, whom I can love, as I love my daughter also. As to the estate, you know my views about that. I abhor entails, which only serve to create discord in the family."
The baron took a pinch, evidently in order to becalm; but the remedy seemed this time to have the opposite effect, for he continued, after this interruption, with increasing violence:
"Why did you absolutely want to marry your daughter to Felix? Because Felix may possibly one of these days inherit the entail! Why is Felix your special protégé? Because he may possibly inherit the entail! Why must O have Felix in my house, whom I cannot bear, and do without Helen, whom I love? Because Felix may inherit the entail?"
"Don't repeat yourself so often, dear Grenwitz," said Anna Maria in a quiet tone, which did not harmonize at all with the deep-red spots on her cheeks and the piercing sharpness of her large gray eyes, "and do not excite yourself unnecessarily so much, your cough will return directly. It matters very little how you think about entailed estates. You cannot change them, God be thanked. But as for me, you must permit me to think differently about it, and to do in that direction what I think is my duty. If, you have no duties to fulfil to your children, I have. If you are willing to give your daughter to the first adventurer who wants her, or whom she wants--you need not stamp impatiently with your sick foot; and you will spill the snuff on the carpet if you knock your box so violently on the arm of the chair. I say, if it is indifferent to you whom Helen marries, it is not so to me. I have advocated the marriage with Felix, not from obstinacy, which I leave to others, but because I thought it was a good match, the best which a girl without fortune could make. You can see how little obstinate I am when you consider that I am no longer in favor of the match since Felix's accident, since the doctor thinks he is consumptive. On the contrary, as soon as it is well ascertained that Felix wont live long, I shall be one of the first to drop him, especially as he will leave nothing but debts."
The old gentleman seemed to be by no means pleased with this exhibition of cold-blooded egotism. He had a kind of dim perception--not the first of its kind--that his highly moral wife might possibly have a very bad heart, and he sighed. It is bitter to have to give up in the evening of life an illusion which we have indulged in for a quarter of a century.
He fell into silent meditation. What it was that had occupied his thoughts, he showed in the first words that fell from him. After a pause, during which Anna Maria had been busy at her work, in nervous silence;