Poor little soul. I've tried kissing her, and it did no good either. I petted her for a whole day; sat with my arms round her; had her head on my shoulder; whispered every consolation I could think of; but unfortunately the only person who has ever petted her was the faithless one, and it made her think of him with renewed agony, and opened positive sluices of despair. I've tried scolding her--the 'My dear Vicki, really for a woman grown' tone, but she gets so much of that from her mother, and besides she isn't a woman grown, but only a poor, unhappy, cheated little child. But how dull, how dry, how profitless are the comfortings of one woman for another. I feel it in every nerve the whole time I am applying them. One kiss from the wretched man himself and the world blazes into radiance. A thousand of the most beautiful and eminent verities enunciated by myself only collect into a kind of frozen pall that hangs about her miserable little head and does nothing more useful than suffocate her. She has been inclined to feel bad ever since the fatal letter about the soup, but there were intervals in which with infinite haulings I did get her up on to the rocks again, those rocks she finds so barren, but from whose tops she can at least see clearly and be kept dry. Now that this terrible weather has come upon us, and every day is wetter and sadder than the last, she has collapsed entirely. If I could write as well as Papa I would like to write an essay on the connection between a wet November and the renewed buddings of love. Frau von Lindeberg is dreadfully angry, and came up, and actually came in, a thing she has not done yet, and sat on the sofa, carefully enthroned in its middle and well spread out in case I should so far forget myself as to want to sit upon it too, and asked me what nonsense I had been putting into the child's head. 'Nonsense?' I exclaimed, remembering my noble talk. 'She was getting over it. You must have said something.' 'Said something? Yes, indeed I said something. Never has one person said so many things before.' She stared in amazement. 'What,' she cried, 'you actually--you dared--you have the effrontery--' 'Shall I tell you what I said?' And for an hour I gave the astonished lady, hemmed in on the sofa by the table and by my chair, the outlines of my views on ideals and conduct. I made the most of the hour. The outlines were very thick. No fidgeting or attempts to stop me were considered. She had come to scold; she should stay to learn. 'Well, well,' she said, when I, tired of talking, got up and removed the impeding table with something of the brisk politeness of a dentist unhooking the patient's bib and screwing down his chair after he has done his worst, 'you seem to be a good sort of girl. You have, I see, meant no harm.' 'Meant no harm? I neither meant it nor did I do it. Allow me to make the point clearer--' And I prepared to push back the table upon her and began again.