But quite respectable personages came wandering all the long way up the hill. Herr Oehmchen and Herr Leinhose were indefatigable. With them came not seldom the young widow with the heart-shaped face, in the wise conviction that the dangerous maiden could at worst take only one of her well-nourished boarders from her, and that it would pay her to keep on good terms with both.
Besides these a courtier often came up, a man who had in the neighborhood of Weimar a rather heavily mortgaged estate. But he had also faultless manners, an extraordinarily small head and aristocratic hands. He could look back upon a long line of ancestors, who had all nibbled away something of his property and his personality; there was little of either left, and it was extremely sensible of him to think of supplementing them. He was superior to all the others when it came to a question of form, and so made a great impression on them. They considered him a dangerous rival, and rejoiced when he was obliged to stay in his town house--for he went to court--when they had anything on like a sleigh-ride or a dance; in fact, they arranged such things if possible on days when they knew he would have to be absent.
Dances, musical evenings, masked balls, sewing-circles were abundant that winter in Weimar, and the pretty Rauchfuss girl was asked to everything--now it was one paying attention to her, now another. She had plenty of cavaliers: all the marriageable merchants' sons of the town, young lawyers--in brief, the wooers recruited themselves from the entire circle of the townspeople, and even beyond it. The hunt was on, and every one joined it who could.
She loved dancing. It seemed to her the most glorious thing in the world to forget herself, to let herself dissolve in music and motion. She distinguished her suitors only by their ability as dancers; as to their intellectual capacity, which indeed was not specially noticeable in any of them, she easily confused them. She herself was without any instinct of the chase or desire for conquest, simply contented and happy in herself.
So the time passed on. The impatience of the aspirants might well have seemed to her like a flood rising to her very lips, threatening and terrifying her, or like a row of insistent creditors, with herself sitting in her little room in peace and letting them knock and call as loud as they would. She did not realize the impatience of the hunters; they seemed all so foreign, so far off to her.
To take one of these strangers into her house, to have him always about, to be obliged to see him every day, seemed a thing so distasteful and impossible that the thought did not even trouble her. But she dreamed of wonders--of one whom she would long to love. She felt something strong, great and good in herself, and realized at the same time her ignorance and her limitations. Her longing for freedom was also a longing for breadth, a desire to escape from all that was narrow, a will to grow.
Hitherto no one had offered her the bread of life; and she was hungry. Her beauty had in it something sleeping, something strong, that yearned to be active in this world and beyond; but no one offered to nourish this wonderful thing. What they offered her was no royal, soul-strengthening food; it was but ordinary, every-day diet, on which she would pine away and starve.
Yes ... she dreamed long, amidst all her suitors, of an awakening compared with which the life which these others called into being in her was but a deep, dull sleep.
The Raven-mother took delight in observing that the fortress she was set to guard showed no signs of surrendering; for so the comfortable existence up at the Rauchfuss farm might prolong itself a while longer.
On Sunday afternoons and evenings they had the most of their visitors. Then came the suitors, the Kirsten girls with their friends, the pretty young widow, and often the good Kummerfelden, who took great delight in listening to the irrational chatter of the amorous youths.