‘On the contrary,’ replied the Doctor. ‘My observation has confirmed my fears. It will not do, Otto, not do.’
‘What will not do?’ demanded the Prince, with a sickening stab of pain.
‘None of it,’ answered Gotthold. ‘You are unfitted for a life of action; you lack the stamina, the habit, the restraint, the patience. Your wife is greatly better, vastly better; and though she is in bad hands, displays a very different aptitude. She is a woman of affairs; you are—dear boy, you are yourself. I bid you back to your amusements; like a smiling dominie, I give you holidays for life. Yes,’ he continued, ‘there is a day appointed for all when they shall turn again upon their own philosophy. I had grown to disbelieve impartially in all; and if in the atlas of the sciences there were two charts I disbelieved in more than all the rest, they were politics and morals. I had a sneaking kindness for your vices; as they were negative, they flattered my philosophy; and I called them almost virtues. Well, Otto, I was wrong; I have forsworn my sceptical philosophy; and I perceive your faults to be unpardonable. You are unfit to be a Prince, unfit to be a husband. And I give you my word, I would rather see a man capably doing evil than blundering about good.’
Otto was still silent, in extreme dudgeon.
Presently the Doctor resumed: ‘I will take the smaller matter first: your conduct to your wife. You went, I hear, and had an explanation. That may have been right or wrong; I know not; at least, you had stirred her temper. At the council she insults you; well, you insult her back—a man to a woman, a husband to his wife, in public! Next upon the back of this, you propose—the story runs like wildfire—to recall the power of signature. Can she ever forgive that? a woman—a young woman—ambitious, conscious of talents beyond yours? Never, Otto. And to sum all, at such a crisis in your married life, you get into a window corner with that ogling dame von Rosen. I do not dream that there was any harm; but I do say it was an idle disrespect to your wife. Why, man, the woman is not decent.’
‘Gotthold,’ said Otto, ‘I will hear no evil of the Countess.’
‘You will certainly hear no good of her,’ returned Gotthold; ‘and if you wish your wife to be the pink of nicety, you should clear your court of demi-reputations.’
‘The commonplace injustice of a by-word,’ Otto cried. ‘The partiality of sex. She is a demirep; what then is Gondremark? Were she a man—’
‘It would be all one,’ retorted Gotthold roughly. ‘When I see a man, come to years of wisdom, who speaks in double-meanings and is the braggart of his vices, I spit on the other side. “You, my friend,” say I, “are not even a gentleman.” Well, she’s not even a lady.’
‘She is the best friend I have, and I choose that she shall be respected,’ Otto said.