"And then how well your house is furnished. When papa had bought his new weapon cabinet and hung above his writing desk the head of a buffalo, and beneath that a picture of old general Wrangel, under whom he had once served as an adjutant, he was very proud of what he had done. But when I see these things here, all our Hohen-Cremmen elegance seems by the side of them merely commonplace and meagre. I don't know what to compare them with. Even last night, when I took but a cursory look at them, a world of ideas occurred to me."
"And what were they, if I may ask?"
"What they were? Certainly. But you must not laugh at them. I once had a picture book, in which a Persian or Indian prince (for he wore a turban) sat with his feet under him on a silk cushion, and at his back there was a great red silk bolster, which could be seen bulging out to the right and left of him, and the wall behind the Indian prince bristled with swords and daggers and panther skins and shields and long Turkish guns. And see, it looks just like that here in your house, and if you will cross your legs and sit down on them the similarity will be complete."
"Effi, you are a charming, dear creature. You don't know how deeply I feel that and how much I should like to show you every moment that I do feel it."
"Well, there will be plenty of time for that. I am only seventeen, you know, and have not yet made up my mind to die."
"At least not before I do. To be sure, if I should die first, I should like to take you with me. I do not want to leave you to any other man. What do you say to that?"
"Oh, I must have some time to think about it. Or, rather, let us not think about it at all. I don't like to talk about death; I am for life. And now tell me, how shall we live here? On our travels you told me all sorts of queer things about the city and the country, but not a word about how we shall live here. That here nothing is the same as in Hohen-Cremmen and Schwantikow, I see plainly, and yet we must be able to have something like intercourse and society in 'good Kessin,' as you are always calling it. Have you any people of family in the city?"
"No, my dear Effi. In this regard you are going to meet with great disappointments. We have in the neighborhood a few noble families with which you will become acquainted, but here in the city there is nobody at all."
"Nobody at all? That I can't believe. Why, you are upward of three thousand people, and among three thousand people there certainly must be, beside such inferior individuals as Barber Beza (I believe that was his name), a certain élite, officials and the like."
Innstetten laughed. "Yes, officials there are. But when you examine them narrowly it doesn't mean much. Of course, we have a preacher and a judge and a school principal and a commander of pilots, and of such people in official positions I presume there may be as many as a dozen altogether, but they are for the most part, as the proverb says, good men, but poor fiddlers. And all the others are nothing but consuls."