Leo felt a speechless fury boiling within him. He wanted to move, but could not stir. At last he made a violent effort to regain his manliness.
"Why do we grope about in the past?" he asked, jumping to his feet. "It can lead to no good."
"It helps us to forget the misery of the present. Isn't that some good?" she replied.
He did not contradict her, and turned to go. But in parting he caught hold of her in a sudden spasm of rage, shook her hither and thither, and, burying his fingers in the elastic flesh of her upper arm, he bent down and muttered in her ear--
"You are right ... We will pray."
XXVII
The beginning of winter found everything the same as usual at the Parsonage. The Candidate had not succeeded in raising the money for the continuation of his studies. He therefore was preparing calmly to spend the winter term under the paternal roof.
He decided to employ the many hours of leisure which stretched before him, in settling on authorship as his calling in life, and to write an epoch-making work, which would raise him with one bound to the highest pinnacle of fame. The work was to be of a scientific character, and to give shape and method to the floating chaotic ideas of modernity.
A public career lay open to him also. All you had to do to be elected to the Reichstag, was to sit down and write a few social pamphlets on prostitution, or the duel question; and if the ministry did not see its way after that to give you an appointment, you must become active in opposition, not that miserable half-hearted opposition of abortive Liberalism, but the firebrand kind of Lassalles, which bore upon it the imprint of genius, and left plenty of time over for love adventures.
Altogether it had been easier for an Oswald Stein. In those days, as an adherent of the Sturm and Drang party, one knew what to be at. To cut a path for freedom from the barricades, and then get hewn down by the truncheons of tyranny. But since the seventies there had been no tyrants; and people no longer stirred up revolutions. It was considered neither gentlemanly nor "modern."