"The case is precisely the same with me, my child. Years of study and intercourse are not necessary to understand a superior nature. A few traits enable it to be characterized, single extremes allow its full compass to be measured, and as one accord contains the elements of music, so it can easily reveal to the observer the keynotes of its soul; and you did this. Wherever I struck, it echoed. I know the whole scale of your nature, although a thousand sweet harmonies which may be formed from it are still concealed from me." "Tell me, _Heinrich_, how long have you loved me?" "Since, since--permit me to answer you with the most common of all forms of speech,--since the first time I saw you." "Since our meeting in the prison?" "Yes; I cannot tell you what a powerful impression I received from you. I was astonished! Your boldness, your disregard of my dignity, your philanthropic enthusiasm, so entirely devoid of all affectation and sentimentality, aroused the greatest admiration, and your beauty excited my love. Had you been merely beautiful, I should only have desired you; but since you showed an equal intellect, I love you, and loved you from the beginning as I never did any other." "As you never loved any other?" asked Cornelia. She had seated herself upon the sofa, and he took a chair beside her. She folded her arms upon the little barrier the broad side of the divan formed between them, and they gazed lovingly into each other's eyes. "As I never loved any other," repeated _Henri_. "If you fully realized your own value, you would not look at me so incredulously. You would know that you must be loved differently from the commonplace girls with whom people can only trifle, whose insignificance renders all serious conversation impossible. There is nothing which continues to keep a woman interesting to a man except _originality_; and before I knew you I almost despaired of finding it. The female mind cannot reach the perception of things by the established, endlessly long path marked out for it; it has not sufficient perseverance, cannot keep pace with man. Most women pause half-way, with the goal before their eyes, but unable to reach it; they then become weary, disgusted with the world, and consume themselves in idle longings, which they at last permit some friend to heal. Others turn into by-paths of fruitless scholarship, and wonder aimlessly to and fro; such persons become utterly disagreeable, a terror to every man, for they enter into a sort of intellectual competition with him, which is charmless and a mere waste of time, because there is no true honorable victory to be obtained in such an unequal struggle. The true womanly nature knows the extent of her powers; she does not strive for things too far beyond her, for she cheerfully makes out her own object and builds her own path to it. This unthinking exercise of natural instincts, this radiance of free, pure thought, beaming from a youthful brow, is extremely refreshing, and