"I?"--Linda opens her eyes wide--"naturally; he is the first man with a faultless profile and good manners whom I have met--since Laure de Lonsigny's father!"
Old Harfink, wholly absorbed in gazing at his tongue in a hand-glass, has not heard the bold malice of his daughter. Raimund, on the contrary, says emphatically, "I find your delight at marrying a nobleman highly repulsive," and leaves the room.
And Felix? He does not undress that night. Motionless his face buried in the pillows, he lies on his bed and still fights a long-lost battle.
The air is heavy with the fragrance of linden blossoms and the approaching thunder-storm. A massive wall of clouds towers above the horizon like a barrier between heaven and earth.
V.
Susanna Blecheisen, now Mrs. Harfink, usually called Madame von Harfink, was a famous blue-stocking. As a young girl she was interested in natural sciences, studied medicine, complained of the oppression of the female sex, and wrote articles on the emancipation of woman, in which with great boldness she described marriage as an antiquated and immoral institution.
In spite of the energetic independence of her character, in her twenty-eighth year she succumbed to the magnetic attraction of a red-cheeked clerk in her father's office, and generously sacrificed for him her scorn of manly prejudice and ecclesiastical sacraments--she married him.
Hereupon she moved with her husband to Vienna, and soon enjoyed a certain fame there on account of her fine German, and because she subscribed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and had once sat beside Humboldt at a dinner, perhaps also because her husband was a very wealthy manufacturer.
Soon convinced of the inferior intellect of this man, she did not give herself up to cowardly despair at this discovery, but did her best to educate him. She patiently read to him works on capital, during which he incessantly rattled the money in his pockets, as if he would say, How does the theoretical analysis of capital concern a practical man, as long as he relies solely upon the actual substance? This rubbish furnished occupation for poor wretches, he thought to himself, which opinion he finally announced to his wife. But when she told him that Carl Marx and Lassalle were both very wealthy men, he listened to her dissertations with considerably heightened respect. From political economy, which she treated as a light recreation, fitted to his case, she led him into the gloomy regions of German metaphysics, and plunged him confusedly into the most dangerous abysses of misused logic.
He listened calmly, without astonishment, without complaining, with the lofty conviction that to cultivate one's self, as every kind of tasty idleness, was a very noble occupation, and, like many more clever people, he made a rule of despising everything which he did not understand. Instead of any other comment, during his wife's readings he merely rubbed his hands pleasantly, and murmured as long as he was not asleep, titteringly, "This confusion, this confusion."