The Staatsräthin shook her head in rising displeasure. "You do not understand me." "I understand you far better than I am understood by you." "You probably think my homely wisdom very easy of comprehension--while yours is too deep for my powers of mind." The Staatsräthin laid down her knife, and pushed away the dish of beans. "But the time may come when you will think of what I have been saying, and will be sorry that you have repulsed me." "Frau Staatsräthin, I have not repulsed you. I am only too honest to accept a regard bestowed upon me on conditions that I cannot fulfil. To gain your approval I should be obliged to equivocate,--and I have always been true. It is robbery to accept an affection springing from a false idea of one's character. What would it profit me to throw myself on your breast and silently return your tenderness, when I know that you would love me not for what I am, but for what I might pretend to be? Sooner or later you would discover your error, and despise me for deceiving you. No, I am not unworthy of the love of good people just as I am, but if I cannot win it by frankness and conscientiousness, I will never try to steal it." "You speak proudly. Such self-assertion does not become a young girl towards an old woman, least of all towards the mother of her best friend and benefactor." "Frau Staatsräthin," cried Ernestine, "I shall always be grateful to your son for his kindness to me, but surely I ought not to testify my gratitude by hypocrisy and slavish servility." "My dear," said the Staatsräthin, controlling herself, "you agitate yourself causelessly. I am a simple, practical woman, who does not speak your language, and cannot follow you in your flights. I have no desire to drag you down to us. I simply wish to show you the world in its actual shape, that you may know what awaits you when you come to make your home in it; and I would gladly receive you in my motherly arms, lest you should receive too severe a shock from your first contact with reality." "Oh, Frau Staatsräthin, if the world is what you describe it to me, I would rather remain above it, in a colder but purer sphere." "I should have thought the sphere in which you were not safe from the assaults of angry peasants hardly a desirable one. I, at least, should prefer the modest discharge of domestic duties in the circle of home. But tastes differ." Ernestine shrank from these words. "Truth is born in heaven, but stoned upon the earth. Those who wish to bring it into the world must have the courage of martyrs. These are such old commonplaces that one can hardly give utterance to them without their seeming trite. Those who recognize truth must speak it, and the happiness of possessing it outweighs with me the misery that I may incur in speaking it." "Forgive me, but these are phrases that utterly fail to cast any halo around such a disgraceful occurrence as that of yesterday." "Frau Staatsräthin!" cried Ernestine, flushing up.