Ernestine shrugged her shoulders. "You are perfectly right from your point of view, Frau Staatsräthin, but your point of view is not mine. To me a woman's mission is something higher. A noble mind cannot condescend to occupy itself with such cares, which are--forgive me the expression--always more or less sordid." The Staatsräthin frowned slightly, but she did not interrupt Ernestine, who continued: "It is hard enough that so much of the brute cleaves to us that we must eat and drink to keep our physical mechanism in order; thus, in the process of development, we never attain any higher degree of perfection. We ought to take pride in developing ourselves as fully as possible, in contending against every animal appetite instead of making a formal study how best to pamper it. We ought to blush for our frail, indigent physical nature, instead of making an idol of it and regarding her who sacrifices to it most freely as the loftiest illustration of feminine virtue." "That all sounds very fine," said the Staatsräthin, "but it is, nevertheless, a deplorable mistake. With the capacity for pleasure the Creator has bestowed upon us the right to enjoy. We ought only to see to it that our pleasures are true and noble. It is false shame that would repudiate what we cannot live without, and it sounds strangely contradictory from the lips of a natural philosopher like yourself. Before whom would you blush? Before your fellow-beings? Certainly not, for they all share your mortal infirmities. And, since you do not believe in a God, where does there exist for you any supernatural ideal, any bodiless spirit, subject to do change nor desire of change, before whom you can be ashamed of being a mortal?" "In myself,--in my own imagination." "Yes, yes, this is the usual jargon. Because you deny your God, and still feel the need of Him, you exalt yourself into a divinity, and are humiliated at the idea of your imprisonment within a mortal frame!" "Oh, no, I am not so vain and arrogant. There is, if I may thus express it, a refinement of mind that is shocked by the coarse demands of material nature. And I should be afraid of degrading myself in my own eyes if, in satisfying these demands, I used the time and ability that might be employed for higher purposes."