"Patience, Laura," said the Doctor; "let us persevere. My confidence in your father's heart is greater than yours. He will gradually reconcile himself to me."
"Yes, after he has broken both our hearts; even great love is crushed by constant opposition. I cannot, amidst the wrangling of our hostile families, become your wife; the narrow street and the old hatred are destructive to me. I have often sat here lamenting that I was not a man who could boldly battle for his own happiness. Listen to a secret, Fritz," she said, approaching him, again wringing her hands; "here I am becoming haughty, malicious, and wicked."
"I have observed nothing of that kind," replied Fritz, astonished.
"I conceal it from you," exclaimed Laura; "but I struggle daily with bad thoughts, and I am indifferent to the love of my parents. When my father pats my head, the devil cries within me he had better let it alone. When my mother admonishes me to have patience, her talk secretly irritates me, because she uses finer words than are necessary. I hate the dog, so that I often beat him without cause. The conversation at the Sunday dinner, the stories of the old actor, and the eternal little tittle-tattle of the street appear insupportable to me. I feel that I am an odious creature, and I have frequently in this place wept over and hated myself. These bad fits are ever recurring and become more overpowering. I shall never be better here: where we live under a curse, like two spoiled children. We sink, Fritz, in these surroundings! Even the loving care of parents ceases to make one happy--the anxiety that one should not wet one's feet, that one should wear woolen stockings, and have cakes and sugar plums on a Sunday--is one to go through all this every year of one's life?"
She hastily opened her journal, and held out to him a bundle of poems and letters.
"Here are your letters; through these I have learnt to love you, for here is what I revere in you. Thus would I always have you be. When, therefore, I think of what you have to go through between our houses and to bear from my father, and when I observe that you wear a double shawl under every rough blast, I become anxious and worried about you; and I see you before me as a pampered book-worm, and myself as a little stout woman with a large cap and an insignificant face, sitting before the coffee cups, talking over the daily passers by, and this thought oppresses my heart."
Fritz recognized his letters. He had long felt certain that Laura was his secret confidant, but when he now looked at the loved one who held up to him the secret correspondence, he no longer thought of the caprice which had occasioned him so much grief; he thought only of the true-heartedness and of the poetry of this tender connexion.
"Dear, dear Laura," he exclaimed, embracing her; "it seems as if two souls with which my heart had intercourse had become one, but you now divide me and yourself into human beings of daily life, and into higher natures. What has destroyed your cheerful confidence?"
"Our difficulties, Fritz, and the sorrow of seeing you without pleasure, and hearing your voice without being elevated by it; you are with me, and yet further off from me than in those days when I did not see you at all, or only in the society of friends."
She released herself from his embrace.