"It all amounts to the same thing: old or young, he is a man whom I do not love, and never could love."
The old lady shakes her head impatiently: "Are you beginning upon that? Love? I thought you had more sense. Love!--love! Heaven preserve you from that disease! The only sound foundations for a happy marriage are unbounded esteem and warm sympathy: anything more is an evil."
Erika is silent, and the old Countess continues: "No respectable woman should indulge in passion. Passion is an intoxication, and nausea is sure to follow upon intoxication. Therefore a respectable woman, who can at the most indulge but once in such intoxication, condemns herself, after a short period of bliss, to nausea for the rest of her life. Only the unprincipled woman who cures her nausea by a fresh passion can permit herself such indulgence. It is all nonsense for one of us."
During this long speech the Countess has seated herself in an arm-chair with a volume of Taine's 'Les Origines de la France' open in her lap, and to lend emphasis to her words she taps the book from time to time with a large Japanese paper-knife.
Erika stands near her, leaning upon the piano, tall and graceful in her white gown. "And what am I to infer from your preachment? That I must marry Helmy Nimbsch, even without love?"
"Helmy Nimbsch? Who is talking of him?" The old lady almost starts from her chair.
"I thought you were, grandmother," Erika says, with a mischievous smile. "If I am not mistaken, he was the subject of our conversation."
"Nonsense! Helmy Nimbsch! Ce n'est pas serieux!"
"Of whom, then, are you talking?" Erika asks, looking her grandmother full in the face.
"Oh, of no one: I was talking in general," her grandmother replies, with some irritation, adding, still more petulantly, after a pause, "If you have unbounded esteem and warm sympathy for young Nimbsch, why, marry him, by all means."