"Do not speak thus, Walter,--you do not know what you are saying. I have, through much pain, obtained the victory over self, and will content myself with my lot as a woman, but I am weak, and such speeches might easily arouse again within me the demon of ambition. Yon mean it kindly, but, now that I stand on the borders of the realm I have forsaken, I must not listen to any voice recalling me to that dear old home. I have come to take leave of you. Your father will tell you wherefore and whither I am going."
"Oh, Fräulein Ernestine, are you going away? and are you going to give up your studies too?"
"I must resign them, Walter, or at least all scientific pursuits. My knowledge must be to me now a means of support, and in these days it can serve me only in the position of a governess. I must content myself with teaching in a girls' school. Men do not want women for professors, and no man wants a professor for a wife. The world is not what I dreamed,--there is no place in it for a woman's efforts, and I am too weak to create one for myself."
"What a shame it is," said Walter, "that such a woman should need to create a place for herself! she should be placed upon a pedestal and worshipped, if only for the sake of such a mind in such a body."
Leonhardt laid his hand in warning upon the boy's arm.
"Father, I must speak," he went on. "I must give some relief to the indignation that fills me at the idea of such a nature's being condemned to contend in the world for the bare means of subsistence."
Ernestine hid her face in her hands, and sighed heavily.
Leonhardt shook his head disapprovingly at his son. "It is not kind, Walter, to make the sacrifice harder than it need be. Ernestine is and always must be noble, and never was she nobler than in her present resolution. We cannot change the world, Walter, and Ernestine is a woman,--she must submit."
"Yes, submit!" she repeated, and there was a keener pain in her accents.
"Fräulein Ernestine," Walter implored her, "forgive me if I have revived buried griefs. I meant well,--I cannot tell you what pain it gives me to see you giving up what is so dear to you, and for me your going is like the departure of his muse to the poet,--the vanishing of his saint to the rapt devotee."