Freiburg, December 23.
Dear Max—I have read with much sympathy your account of your little mishaps and annoyances. The cook often spoke to me very much as she did to you, but I put up with it because she is a good cook, and only cooks who know nothing are polite. Now you see what I have had to stand for years, and that there are problems in that department also which can not be solved by natural science.
I can not, at this instance, advise you what to do, and should not consider myself justified in doing so now that our intimate relations have been terminated in so dignified a manner, as you so truly remark in your first letter. As for the furrier's ticket and the sleeve buttons, I will wager that I could find them both in five minutes. You must remember how often you have hunted in vain for a thing which I have found at the first attempt. Men occasionally discover a new truth but never an old button.
Since a correspondence has been begun by you, I have a little request to make. I forgot before I left to ask you for the letters which you wrote me during our engagement, and which at my request you put in your safe. They are my property, and I should like to have them as a reminder of happier days. Will you be so kind as to send them to me?
Wishing you a Merry Christmas,
Emma.
Prof. Max Wiegand to Frau Emma Wiegand
Berlin, December 25.
My Dear Emma—Your kind wish that I might have a Merry Christmas has not been fulfilled. I never spent so melancholy a Christmas Eve. You will not wonder that I could not bear to accept the invitations of friends—to be a looker-on at family rejoicings—so I stayed at home, entirely alone. I found it utterly impossible to get a servant before New Year's, and yesterday was even without a helper from outside. The porter's wife put a cold supper on the table for me early in the afternoon, for she was too busy later with Christmas preparations for her children. A smoky oil lamp took the place of the Christmas tree which you always adorned so charmingly and with such exquisite taste every year, and there were none of those pretty surprises by which you supplied my wants and wishes almost before I was conscious of them. There was nothing on the Christmas table but my old fur coat, which Herr Palaschke—softened by my entreaties and assurances and perhaps also by the spirit of Christmastide—had allowed me to take the preceding day. It was as cold as charity in the room, for the fire had gone out and it was beyond my skill to rekindle it, so I put on the fur coat, sat down by the smoky lamp, and read over the letters which I wrote you during the time of our engagement and which I had taken from their eleven years' resting-place to send to you to-day.
Dear Emma, I can not tell you how they have moved me. I cried like a child, not over the tragic ending of our marriage alone, but at the change in myself which I recognize. They are very immature and in many ways not in accordance with my present way of thinking, but what a fresh, frank, warm-blooded fellow I was then, and how I loved you! How happy I was! How artlessly and unreservedly did I give myself up to my happiness! Till now I have thought that there has been a gradual, slow change in you alone, but now I see that I also have altered, and God knows, when I compare the Max of those days with the Max of to-day, I do not know to which to give the preference. In the sleepless nights which I have lately spent, I have thought over the possibility of transforming myself into the Max I then was, and grave doubts have suggested themselves whether the differences in our views of matters and things were really as great as they seemed to us, whether there is not outside of them something eternally human, some neutral ground where we might continue to have interests in common.