Emanuel immediately began speaking of that beloved pupil of his; not at all as if Clotilda had clearly described to him the third Easter-holiday, or as if Emanuel had guessed it, but this guileless man simply knew not the difference between love and friendship, and he would have said of himself as well as of Victor, that he loved her. And just this childlike _naïveté_, which, through the open chamber of a woman's heart, watched for no right of transit nor for any breaches, but laid bare his own, and which fished for no confessions, found fault with none, took advantage of none,--this quality must have been just what would bind with the Gordian ganglion of sympathy the shyest female soul to so open a manly one. Nay, I believe Clotilda could more easily have made known her love to her teacher than to her beloved.--As this Emanuel now told him how he had pictured to her all the scenes of his former sojourn here,--and all his raptures,--and his confession of friendship for her,--how he had read to her his letters, and how the second (that disconsolate one on the night of the Stamitz concert) had forced so many tears into her eyes,--and as Victor saw how very much his friend had by his breathing on it drawn her love open like a closing tulip-cup,--all this kindled his love for her, his friendship for him even to devotion, and in a blissful embarrassment he kissed the blind one. By this double love he now explained to himself Clotilda's easy consent to his Whitsuntide journey. He would have held it all Angel's- and a Peter's-fall from friendship, not to propose directly the question to Emanuel, when he might see this beloved--of Virtue.--"Now!" said the latter, who, despite his respectful East-Indian gentleness toward women, knew not the nose-rings, binding-keys, and dampers of our Harem-decency. But Victor acted otherwise and yet thought just so. He had already asked when abroad: "Why do they suffer the wretched police-regulation to stand for maidens, that they, e. g., must never walk out singly, but always, like Nuremberg Jews, under the escort of an old crone, or like the monks, in pairs?" Not as if this would in any manner embarrass me, if I acted a romance, but that it would, if I wrote one, where I should have to keep to the female rules-of-march at the expense of the critical, and trail round with me a convoy of auxiliary-women through the whole book as an abattis to my heroine. Should I not be obliged, if I would so much as get her out beyond the house door-steps, to march along beside her with a crown-guard of female keepers of the seal? Should I not be obliged by this confounded co-investiture and trading in company with Virtue--there would be no such thing as doing business on one's own account--to foist female friends on my heroine contrary to all probability? I should think hard, to be sure, of a Spanish maiden if she showed me her foot, and of a Turkish, if she showed me her face,