Then the old Countess would reply, "I really cannot see what reason you have to disbelieve it. You cannot alter human nature by shutting your eyes to its defects."
Whereupon Erika would say, with annihilating emphasis, "If human nature really is what you describe it, I cannot understand your pleasure in frequenting society, since you must despise unutterably those who compose it."
"Despise!" her grandmother repeated, shaking her head. "I despise no one. Knowing, as I do, how mankind struggles under the burden of animal instincts, I wonder to see it ever rise above them, and I am forced to esteem men in spite of everything."
Erika only repeated, angrily, "Esteem! esteem!" Her grandmother's mode of esteeming mankind was certainly extraordinary.
CHAPTER XVII.
The Princess Dorothea was pacing her salon restlessly to and fro. From time to time she gazed out of the window into the dreary Berlin March weather, upon the heaps of dirty snow shovelled up on each side of the street and slowly melting beneath the falling rain.
The Princess was annoyed. She had been left out in the invitation to a court ball. Usually she would have ascribed the omission to an oversight of the authorities, but to-day the matter disturbed her: instead of an oversight she suspected the omission to have been an intentional slight, and her steps as she walked to and fro were short and impatient.
Why were they so frightfully moral in Berlin, so aggressively moral? she asked herself. Everywhere else people might do as they chose, if only appearances were preserved.
What had she done, after all? Long ago in Florence Feistmantel had explained to her that marriage, as arranged in civilized countries, was entirely unnatural. The Princess, still pure, in spite of the degradation about her, had laughed aloud at the philosophic view thus advanced by her companion and guide. Years afterwards she had recalled this theory that it might serve to justify herself to herself; and lately--only yesterday--Feistmantel, who was established in Berlin and gave music-lessons in the most aristocratic circles, had enunciated the same views at a breakfast to which Dorothea had invited her, and the Princess had contradicted her positively, had been rude to her, had nearly turned her out of doors, but at the last moment had apologized almost humbly and had finally dismissed her with a handsome present.
She had suspected behind Feistmantel's assertion of her philosophic view a mean attempt to ingratiate herself with her hostess. "As if Feistmantel could suspect anything! No human being can suspect anything," she repeated several times. "And, after all, there is scarcely a woman, beautiful and admired, who is not worse than I."