"How can you ask? Is it not bad enough that the whole town will ask why a girl of sixteen--no, sixteen and a half--should be sent back to school when she has hardly been four weeks at home? And as long as the Grenwitz family was not living in town, there might have been some explanation; but now--oh, I think it is abominable. People must think of her--I don't know what; and it is not so much to be wondered at if they connect Helen in some way or other with the duel fought by her cousin and your amiable friend, Stein."
"And what says Miss Helen?"
"Nothing! You know how she is. She never speaks of family matters; at most she occasionally mentions her father, whom she seems to love most tenderly. She is quiet and serious; but not exactly sad."
"I believe she is much too proud ever to be really sad."
"How so?"
"Sadness is a passive disposition; the disposition of one who sees that he cannot struggle with fate, and therefore submits to endure it as well as he can. But there are characters which resist as long as it is possible, and when nothing more can be done, instead of laying down their arms, break them to pieces and throw them fiercely at the victor's feet."
Sophie came up closer to her betrothed and said, after a pause:
"I am not one of those characters, Franz. I am not too proud to be sad; I have been very often sad these last days. I was sad when you left us with Doctor Stein, although at that time I had no particular reason for being so. But since then, when papa was taken sick and I sat by his bedside, and my greatest anxiety--next to that about papa's life--was whether you had received my letter ... You might have travelled on and on, and my heart was all the time breaking with longing for you! You went to see him, I am sure, before you came to call for me at Miss Bear's."
"Of course! He is better. I begged him to lie down, but he insisted upon sitting up till we should come back."
"And I have wasted so much time! Let us go faster!"