"And are we really to start on this fool's errand?" asked Jobst in a voice thick with suppressed emotion, while wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Some single tears were slowly crawling down his hollow cheeks.
"Yes, indeed," chimed in the Bavarian, "are we actually to run and jump like apes on a rope?" and began to weep in good earnest.
"And you, most charming Miss Buenzlin," added Jobst, "how are you going to behave in the circumstances?"
"It behoves me," answered she and held her handkerchief to her eyes, "to keep silent, to suffer and to look on."
"But afterwards," put in the Suabian, with a sly smile, "afterwards. Miss Zues, when all is over?"
"Oh, Dietrich," she responded softly, "do you not know what the poet says: 'As Fate decides, so turns the heart of maid'?" And in introducing this quotation from Schiller she regarded him so temptingly aside that he again lifted up his long legs and shuffled them, feeling like starting off at once.
While the two rivals arranged their little vehicles on their wheels, and Dietrich did the same, she repeatedly touched him with her elbow, or else stepped on his foot. She also wiped the dust from his hat, but at the same time threw inviting glances towards the others, pretending to be highly amused at the Suabian's eagerness. But she did this without being observed by Dietrich.
And now all three of them drew deep breaths and sighed like so many furnaces. They looked all about them, took off their hats, fanned themselves and then once more put on their hats. For the last time they sniffed the air in all the directions of the compass, and tried to recover their breath. Zues herself felt deeply for them, and for very compassion shed sundry tears.
"Here," she then said, "are the last three prunes. Take each of you one in the mouth, that will refresh you. And now depart, and turn the folly of the wicked into the wisdom of the just! That which the wicked have invented for your confusion, now change into a work of self-denial and of serious enterprise, into the well-considered final act of good conduct maintained for years, and into a competitive race for virtue itself."
And she herself with her own fair hands shoved a dried prune between the cramped lips of each, and each of them at once began to gently chew the prune.