"That I can readily believe. He was that way when you were quite small. And now, Annie, today we have just seen each other, you know; will you visit me often?"
"Oh, certainly, if I am allowed to."
"We can take a walk in the Prince Albrecht Garden."
"Oh, certainly, if I am allowed to."
"Or we may go to Schilling's and eat ice cream, pineapple or vanilla ice cream. I always liked vanilla best."
"Oh, certainly, if I am allowed to."
At this third "if I am allowed to" the measure was full. Effi sprang up and flashed the child a look of indignation.
"I believe it is high time you were going, Annie. Otherwise Johanna will get impatient." She rang the bell and Roswitha, who was in the next room, entered immediately. "Roswitha, take Annie over to the church. Johanna is waiting there. I hope she has not taken cold. I should be sorry. Remember me to Johanna."
The two went out.
Hardly had Roswitha closed the door behind her when Effi tore open her dress, because she was threatened with suffocation, and fell to laughing convulsively. "So that is the way it goes to meet after a long separation." She rushed forward, opened the window and looked for something to support her. In the distress of her heart she found it. There beside the window was a bookshelf with a few volumes of Schiller and Körner on it, and on top of the volumes of poems, which were of equal height, lay a Bible and a songbook. She reached for them, because she had to have something before which she could kneel down and pray. She laid both Bible and songbook on the edge of the table where Annie had been standing, and threw herself violently down before them and spoke in a half audible tone: "O God in Heaven, forgive me what I have done. I was a child—No, no, I was not a child, I was old enough to know what I was doing. I did know, too, and I will not minimize my guilt. But this is too much. This action of the child is not the work of my God who would punish me, it is the work of him, and him alone. I thought he had a noble heart and have always felt small beside him, but now I know that it is he who is small. And because he is small he is cruel. Everything that is small is cruel. He taught the child to say that. He always was a school-master, Crampas called him one, scoffingly at the time, but he was right. 'Oh, certainly if I am allowed to!' You don't have to be allowed to. I don't want you any more, I hate you both, even my own child. Too much is too much. He was ambitious, but nothing more. Honor, honor, honor. And then he shot the poor fellow whom I never even loved and whom I had forgotten, because I didn't love him. It was all stupidity in the first place, but then came blood and murder, with me to blame. And now he sends me the child, because he cannot refuse a minister's wife anything, and before he sends the child he trains it like a parrot and teaches it the phrase, 'if I am allowed to.' I am disgusted at what I did; but the thing that disgusts me most is your virtue. Away with you! I must live, but I doubt if it will be long."