Ernestine sat there pale and exhausted. Johannes took her hand. "Patience, patience, Ernestine. She will soon--you will soon learn to know each other." Ernestine silently shook her head. Her brow was clouded. "There is no home for me here!" "Not yet, but it will become one!" "No, never!" Johannes compressed his lips. "Ernestine, you do not dream how you pain me!" "Pain you, my friend? The only one who is kind to me! Oh, no, I will not,--I cannot!" And she leaned towards him with strong, almost childlike, emotion, and laid her hand upon his. "When I see you thus," said Johannes, with a look of ardent love, "I ask myself whether you can be the same Ernestine who seeks to sacrifice the unfathomed treasure of her rich, overflowing heart to a phantom,--to a struggle that can never yield a thousandth part of the pleasure that she might create for herself and others. Oh God!" and he pressed his lips to Ernestine's hand, "every word that you said to-day stabbed me like a dagger. How was it possible for you to think and talk so, after that hour that we passed together? Oh, lovely white rose that you are, you incline yourself towards me, but, when I would pluck and wear you, your thorns wound my hand!" Ernestine laid her other hand upon his bowed head. "Dear--unspeakably dear--friend, have patience with me. If you could only put yourself in my place! In early childhood, when others are borne in the arms of love and petted and caressed, I was abused, scorned, neglected,--because--I was--a girl. Every cry of my soul, every thought of my mind, every feeling of my young heart, asked, 'Why am I so bitterly punished for not being a boy?' And in every wound that I received were planted the seeds of revenge,--revenge for myself and for my sex,--and of burning ambition to rival those placed so far above me in the scale of creation. These feelings matured quickly in the glow of the indignation which I felt when I saw my sex oppressed and repulsed whenever it strove to rise above its misery. They grew with my growth, strengthened with my physical and mental strength, and they filled my whole being, just as my veins and nerves run through my body. How can I live if you tear them thence?" Johannes held her hand clasped in his, and listened attentively. "It is," continued Ernestine, "as if my heart had frozen to ice just at the moment when the agonized cry, 'Why am I worth less than a boy?' burst from me, and as if that question were congealed within it,--so that I can think and struggle only for the answer to that 'why?' Why are we subject to man? Why do we depend solely upon his magnanimity, and succumb miserably when he withholds it? The times when physical force ruled are past. Everything now depends upon whether the progress of woman is to be retarded by world-old prejudices, or by positive mental inferiority on her part; and I shall never rest until science satisfies me upon this point."