"It pleases you, doubtlessly, to accuse yourself," said Eva. "Those are generally the best people who perceive so many dark spots in their own life."
"Did your governess tell you that?" said the sportsman, smiling. "The good lady may be mistaken."
"How disagreeable you are," said Eva, petulantly.
"Believe me, it was bad enough! Even now, when I feel myself freer, I often see the old shadow cross my path. But in those days the world's contempt pursued me in such a manner as to crush me to the ground. Only when I convinced myself that the world, as it is called, is merely a very small, fading portion of the great world through which I wandered, that what is whispered and insinuated here on the East Sea, becomes of no importance already on the Adriatic, and still less so far, far away on the Pacific, since then I became storm-proof and invulnerable to the little pin-pricks of public opinion, to the gossip of the provincial neighbourhood. But what am I telling you! You do not yet know what all this means, and that you do not know it, that I can see how strange the dark legend of human guilt is to you, that it is which refreshes and benefits me so intensely. You still possess a delicate little conscience that at the outside ticks like a watch; my own alarms me with the groaning beats of a large clock, such as that which hangs at the Kremlin in Moscow."
"If you were in earnest about it," replied Eva, "you would not pass it over in such a light tone."
"Life, thought, feeling, my Fräulein, with you are all cast in one mould. Therefore, you do not comprehend how, in a man of the world, it is all in confusion, how often in him his soul weeps, while his thoughts spend themselves in frivolous raillery."
"That is a bad habit," said Eva. "Why do people turn everything topsy-turvy? Nature must run its course; the tree with its straight growth strives to attain the summit, the plant the blossom, and both Heaven! What, then, would our good Lord say to His world if the trees wished suddenly to stand upon their heads, stirred up the earth with them, and with their roots sought to reach the sky?"
"There are plants, though, my Fräulein, which one can turn upside down, and which then continue to grow briskly; perhaps I am some kind of offshoot of that species. Yet, seriously speaking, my Fräulein, we stand immeasurably higher than Nature, and, therefore, can fall immeasurably lower."
Eva seemed to be lost in meditation, when she heard her companions' voices, calling her name, sound through the aisles of beeches.
"We are at our goal," said the sportsman, "a few more steps and at a turn of the road you will see the roof of the forester's lodge."