"What more can a man need?" continued he. "I am at this moment so content, that I feel nothing wanting, and I am completely happy!" ("You did not speak so to me when to hear it would have made my happiness," I thought. "However great yours was, then, you used to say that you wished for more of it, still more. And now you are calm and content, when my soul is full of inexpressible repentance and unsatisfied tears!") "To me, too, life is good," said I, "and it is precisely because it is so good to me, that I am sad. I feel so detached, so incomplete; I am always wanting some other thing, and yet everything here is so good, so tranquil! Can it be possible that for you no sorrow ever seems mingled with your pleasure in life?--as if, for instance, you were feeling regret for something in the past?" He drew away the hand resting on my head, and was silent for a moment. "Yes, that has been the case with me, formerly, particularly in the spring," he said, as if searching his memory. "Yes, I also have spent whole nights in longings and fears,--and what beautiful nights they were!... But then all was before me, and now all is behind; now I am content with what is, and that to me is perfection," he concluded, with such easy frankness of manner, that, painful as it was to hear, I was convinced that it was the truth. "Then you desire nothing more?" I questioned. "Nothing impossible," he replied, divining my thought. "How wet you have made your head," he went on, caressing me like a child, and passing his hand again over my hair; "you are jealous of the leaves and grass which the rain was falling on; you would like to be the grass and the leaves and the rain; while I--I enjoy simply seeing them, as I do seeing whatever is good, young, happy." "And you regret nothing in the past?" I persisted, with the dull weight on my heart growing heavier and heavier. He seemed to muse for a moment, keeping silent. I saw that he wished to answer honestly. "No!" he said, at length, briefly. "That is not true! that is not true!" I cried, turning and facing him, with my eyes fixed upon his. "You do not regret the past?" "No!" he repeated. "I bless it, but I do not regret it." "And you would not wish to go back to it?" He turned away, looking out over the garden. "I no more wish that than I would wish to have wings. It cannot be." "And you would not re-make this past? And you reproach neither yourself, nor me?" "Never! all has been for the best." "Listen!" said I, seizing his hand to force him to turn towards me. "Listen! Why did you never tell me what you wished from me, that I might have lived exactly as you desired? Why did you give me a liberty which I knew not how to use? why did you cease to teach me? If you had wished it, if you had cared to guide me differently, nothing, nothing would have happened," I went on, in a voice which more and more energetically expressed anger and reproach, with none of the former love.