"Yes, like hearts," she answered, smiling. "I've often noticed that each tree is like its own leaf. Have you ever heard the tops of the trees whispering to each other. They often make gestures like old women, bowing with discretion and dignity; again, one sees them talking together like children, and other times like serious men."
"You're a child of the country," he said--"a child of the country! Be glad of it."
Now, he thought, she would begin to tell him something of her life, of her parents, of her childhood--that she was tired of the country, or that she loved it. "They all do that; they talk of themselves and their memories as soon as they begin to get a little tamer. They're shut up within themselves, in a narrow circle. Nothing has grown but their selves. A man doesn't speak of his growing-process; he speaks of what he has become, what the world is to get from him. No, these womenfolks are a bore!"
To his astonishment, his dissatisfied astonishment, she was rather silent and did not talk about herself. "I have been trying to understand," she said after awhile, "how it happens that you are full of thoughts, and all the other people I know and I myself have none."
"Oh," he said, "dear Mamsell, it is simply because you have not loved life warmly enough."
"Not warmly enough--?" she said thoughtfully.
"Yes," he said, "that's the explanation. You people take everything in such a cool, such a proper way. You never come to the boiling-point, and so there are no thoughts. When you are young, you are just young--without the bliss, the glow, the blessed consuming consciousness. Young people ought to be positively drunk with happy thoughts! If I were a girl and had such a wonderful head of red hair, and limbs of perfect, rounded beauty--by the Lord above! I should run about joyously, in full consciousness of my powers, letting not a single hour of the day be lost. I should taste my youth with all its feelings and thoughts, its sins and its glories. And when old age came on, I should throw myself on the ground and rage and moan and tear my clothes and strew ashes upon my head, and die of grief. But you others, because you don't think and don't know, you are able to live through a dull, proper youth and a comfortable old age. If people knew what a thing youth is, there'd be no holding the world. All that was young would be brewing and fermenting to such a point that no ruler in the world would be able to keep it down."
"Then the world doesn't seem to be made for thinking?" asked the girl seriously.
"No," he answered passionately. "If everybody thought, instead of only one in hundreds of thousands, it would be an impossible place. Just imagine, fair lady, what would happen if women began to think! It's inconceivable. The greatest revolution in history would break out; a volcanic eruption would convulse society. It's quite right--only the few are supposed to think. There must be dead bodies without will, to live mechanically, to do mechanically what they are told. A thinking world--no, thank you! No, Mamsell, we'll stick to the old system."
So they walked along through the splendor of spring, until music sounded in their ears. "Where does it come from?" asked the engraver.