“So it is with everything that I fancy to myself,” he thought. “I have still one of your books, Elsbeth,” he said then.
“I know, I know,” she answered, looking up at him with a smile.
“Pardon me that I—”
“Oh, what a fidget you are,” she jested. “Leo meanwhile has ruined my whole library for me, and wants me now to replenish it for him, because he has nothing more to read.”
Leo, and still Leo over again.
“Have you read much that is beautiful in it?” she asked him.
“Once I knew everything by heart.”
“And now?”
“Now? Oh, good heavens, I have so much to think of in every-day life—they won’t fit into my head any longer.”
“Nor into mine, either, Paul. It is because we have seen too much of life; poetry is lost to us.”