"And you so much impatience?" she asked in return, quietly going on with her drawing. "You are just like our little Oscar. When he has planted a bean, five minutes afterwards he digs it up again to see if it has grown at all." "But he is only seven years old." "Old enough to know that beans do not grow so fast as that." "You always find fault with Oscar, and after all he is your pet." "Who says so?" "Benno told me so yesterday, in strictest confidence. I was not to tell you." "Then you ought not to have told me." "But he is right." "No, he is not right. Oscar is the smallest, and therefore I must look after him the most. Benno and Kurt can get along without me." "Except their exercises, which you correct for them." "Now take your seat again." "I may speak, may I not?" "Certainly." I had taken my seat, but several minutes passed while I sat silently watching her work. A ray of the evening sun, which pierced the thick foliage of the great plane, fell upon her head and surrounded it with an aureole. "Fräulein Paula," I said. "Paula," she answered, without looking up. "Paula, then." "Well?" "I wish I had a sister like you." "You have a sister." "But she is so much older than I, and never cared much for me; and now she of course will have nothing more to do with me." "Where did you say that she lives?" "On the Polish frontier. She has been married, these ten years, to an officer in the customs. She has a number of children." "Then she has enough to do with them; you must not be angry with her." "I am not angry with her; I hardly know her; I believe I should pass her by if I met her on the street." "That is not well; brothers and sisters should hold together. If I thought that ten or twenty years hence I should meet Benno or Kurt or my little Oscar on the street and they would not know me, I should be very unhappy." "They would know you, even if fifty years had passed." "I should be an old woman then; but I shall never be so old." "Why not?" "By that time the boys will have long been men, and will have wives and children, and my father and my mother will long have been buried, and what should I then do in the world?" "But you will marry too." "Never," she replied. Her voice was so serious, and her great blue eyes that looked over the board at my forehead, which she was then drawing, had so grave an expression, that I could not laugh, as I at first felt disposed to do. "Why?" I inquired. "When the boys can do without me, I will be too old." "But you cannot always go on correcting their exercises." "I do not know; it seems to me as if I should always do it." "Even when they are learning Latin and Greek?" "I learn Latin with them now; why should I not learn Greek too?" "Greek is so desperately hard; I tell you, Paula, the irregular verbs--no human creature can learn them unless it be gymnasium professors, and I never can believe that they are exactly men."