"Oh, yes, I have time enough," replied the peasant, flattered by the interest that his remarks had excited. "But, good gracious! I do not know where to begin to tell about her. There is no beginning and no end to it."
"How does she look?" asked the younger gentleman. "Is she pretty?"
"No, indeed! She is pale and thin, and has big, coal-black eyes. And she looks so gloomy that you can tell as soon as you see her that she has an evil conscience."
"It is characteristic of the degree of culture to which the common people have attained," said the elder in an undertone to his companion, "that they have no admiration for beautiful outlines, but only for flesh and colour. They think a classic profile ugly if there is not a plump cheek on either side of it. This rude taste for the raw material is natural and excusable in peasants and common labourers, whose work is principally with raw material. Where should they learn anything better? But it is sad to think how many of the educated classes there are whose taste is just as uncultivated, and who admire only the beautiful embodiment, not the embodied beauty."
"Yes," added the other, "it is just so in spiritual matters. An expression of thoughtfulness is always strange and gloomy in the eyes of the common people; they are attracted only by thoughtless gaiety. The stamp of mind upon a serious brow is in their eyes the sign-manual of the evil one. But how many among ourselves are scarcely better than the people in this respect! We do not share their prejudices,--eh, Johannes?"
"No, Hilsborn, God knows we do not. This superficial idea of beauty explains the fact that Fräulein Hartwich was called ugly as a child, although she had a beautiful brow, a fine profile, and such eyes as I never saw before or since in my life,--eyes, Hilsborn,"--and he laid his hand upon his friend's arm,--"in which lay a world of slumbering feeling, and the promise of bliss unspeakable for him who should awaken it to life. I had forgotten the little girl whom I saw only once, but when lately I encountered a glance from the eyes of that strange, lovely woman, I recognized the child again,--the poor, forsaken child. There was the old shy melancholy in those eyes, and they pierced my heart with a foreboding pain. I could have taken her in my arms and borne her away from the hill where she stood, as formerly from the breaking bough to which she had fled from me!"
"God grant she be worthy of such a man as you!" said Hilsborn.
"Do not speak so, Hilsborn; you know I will not listen to such words. Let us ask this fellow more about her."
He turned to the young peasant, who was walking whistling on the other side of the road.
"Is she not at least kind to the poor?" he asked.