His guest stared at him in silence. The clock on the wall wheezed and struck twelve o'clock. THE GOOSE HERD My dear man, I've been listening to you now for a long while and you fill me with astonishment. You usually show--more than I do myself--an honest wish to take things as they are. Then whence all of a sudden, in making these nice observations of human emotions, do you draw this idealistic illusion of yours? It seems to me your levelling-down democratic sentiment has been playing you a naughty trick again. You maintain, if I understand you correctly, that there is not a profound difference in the way the various social classes feel and express their feelings; while, as a matter of fact, life proves the very reverse every day. Oh, it would be beautiful as a dream if you were right. The ideals of brotherhood and equality that I, the bred-in-the-bone aristocrat--that is what you say I am--must necessarily consider mere figments of the brain, would then be reality, or, rather, have already become reality; because the bit of knowledge more or less cannot possibly produce an organic difference in men's natures. No, no, dear sir, it is the cleavage in the way they feel, more than all differences in wealth, rank, and learning, that separates the upper from the lower classes; so much so that they go through the world together each without comprehension of what the other does, like citizens of different globes. Woe to him who hopes to leap the gap! You don't believe me? You shake your head? Oh, my dear man, I am speaking from experience. Alas, alas! If I could tell you--but why shouldn't I? Night is falling outside, the November storm is howling, and to-day I celebrated the advent of my thirtieth grey hair--quite the atmosphere for conjuring up a picture of light, spring and youth. Let me close my eyes, and you listen to me like a good little boy. I want to tell you of my first love. Do you know who my first love was? A goose-herd, a real, out-and-out gooseherd. I am not joking. I have wept bitter tears over the wrong he did me, and that when I had long been a grown-up, highly respectable young lady. To be sure, when he first set my heart afire, I was still of the age when my highest ideal of happiness was to go barefoot. I was eight years old, he ten. I was the daughter of the lord of the castle, he, the son of our smith. Mornings, when I took breakfast on the verandah with my mother and big brother, he used to pass by with his geese and disappear in the direction of the pasture. At first he stared up at us with naive astonishment, it never occurring to him to raise his cap. Then my brother impressed it upon him that it was proper to give the family a decent greeting, and from that time on he always called up a "Good mornin' to you" like a lesson learned by heart and with a long sweep of his cap.