“But you have grapes and other beautiful fruit!” said Eva smiling. “We have our beautiful things at home!”
“Yes, it is beautiful, very beautiful at home!” exclaimed Wilhelm; “glorious flowers, wild nuts; and there we have Vesuvius before us!” He pointed to the burning pile.
“No,” said Sophie; “it seems to me much more like the pile upon which the Hindoo widow lays herself alive to be burned! That must be horrible!”
“One should certainly be very quickly dead!” said Eva.
“Would you actually allow yourself to be burned to death, if you were a Hindoo widow—after, for instance, Mr. Thostrup, or after Wilhelm,” said she, with a slight embarrassment, “if he lay dead in the fire?”
“If it were the custom of the country, and I really had lost the only support which I had in the world—yes, so I would!”
“O, no, no!” said Louise.
“In fact it is brilliant!” exclaimed Sophie.
“Burning is not, perhaps, the most painful of deaths!” said Otto, and plucked in an absent manner the nuts from the hedge. “I know a story about a true conflagration.”
“What is it like?” asked Wilhelm.