The young man laughed. "It really—I assure you if I may—wouldn't do any good. I'm too awfully interested."
"Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in—a—pulling it down? That's rather in what you've said to me."
"Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though quaking a little, "that he would like to pull it down?"
She met, in her free sweetness, this appeal with such a charm! "Oh perhaps not quite the house——!"
"Good. You see we live on it—I mean we people."
The husband had laughed, but had now so completely ceased to look about him that there seemed nothing left for him but to talk avowedly with the caretaker. "I'm interested," he explained, "in what I think the interesting thing—or at all events the eternally tormenting one. The fact of the abysmally little that, in proportion, we know."
"In proportion to what?" his companion asked.
"Well, to what there must have been—to what in fact there is—to wonder about. That's the interest; it's immense. He escapes us like a thief at night, carrying off—well, carrying off everything. And people pretend to catch Him like a flown canary, over whom you can close your hand, and put Him back in the cage. He won't go back; he won't come back. He's not"—the young man laughed—"such a fool! It makes Him the happiest of all great men."
He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended, with his friendly, his easy, his indescribable competence, for Gedge—poor Gedge who quite held his breath and who felt, in the most unexpected way, that he had somehow never been in such good society. The young wife, who for herself meanwhile had continued to look about, sighed out, smiled out—Gedge couldn't have told which—her little answer to these remarks. "It's rather a pity, you know, that He isn't here. I mean as Goethe's at Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar."
"Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks. This man isn't anywhere. I defy you to catch him."