"Late in the afternoon one dull rainy day we were sitting in the garden-parlor, Anna Maria with her sewing, Klaus reading the newspaper and smoking, when Stürmer came in to talk over some matters with Klaus. Then conversation about horses ended in a political discussion, in which Anna Maria took part with a certain degree of liveliness, and Klaus joined warmly, drawing strong whiffs from his pipe. Stürmer, who had never taken a pipe in his mouth, now and then drove back the clouds with his silk handkerchief in sport, and I amused myself with listening to the ready answers which came from Anna Maria's young lips.
"The demeanor of brother and sister toward each other was singular. Anna Maria waited upon her brother with almost humble tenderness, while he seemed distrustful, and then again secretly touched by the self-sacrificing spirit of the nurse who devoted herself to Susanna. He especially avoided looking at her, or speaking to her directly.
"'How is Fräulein Mattoni getting on?' broke in Stürmer in the midst of a well-turned sentence of Klaus's about the recent attempts to make beet-root sugar.
"'Well!' replied Anna Maria; 'she is reading an old family history which I hunted up the other day, and enjoying your delicious apricots. Thank you for them, Stürmer; they give Susanna great pleasure.'
"Then the conversation turned upon the lately deceased Duke of Weimar, Charles Augustus, and from him to his celebrated friend, Goethe, of whom Stürmer affirmed that he was intending to marry again after the death of his wife. Anna Maria rejected the idea incredulously; she could not believe that he, at his great age, would be so foolish. She was a sworn enemy to Goethe. Her plain, straightforward mind had been disagreeably affected by Werther; such an overflow of feeling could but seem strange to her. Goethe's numerous love-affairs set him out in a light which brought the ideal conception of him down to the atmosphere of common mortals. That genius draws different boundaries, that a fiery spirit like his was not to be measured by the common standard, did not occur to her, and so she now indignantly shook her head.
"'A fable!' I, too, cried, smiling.
"'Not at all,' rejoined Stürmer; 'I have it from Von N——, who is correctly informed, depend upon it!'
"'My!' said Klaus, 'he must have become an old icicle by this time, scarcely able to go among people any more.'
"'A man who has created a Gretchen ossify?' threw in Stürmer. 'Never!'
"'And a Werther?' said I, in joke.