"Yes indeed," said the doctor. "There is truth in Goethe's words: It annoys men to find the truth so simple. They always try to make people believe truth is a marvel, a great wonder, and therefore they adorn it with all kinds of gay rags and fragments, and then carry it about in procession; while such people, like our old woman, read only one chapter in the great book of the universe, but they read it again and again, for sixty, seventy years, till they know it by heart. And as the whole book is but one great revelation, they learn in the end just as much as the great crowd of partially learned men, who turn in restless haste leaf after leaf, pick out a little here and a little there, and are finally about as wise or as stupid as they were before." "Yes indeed," said Oswald; "a striking proof of the justness of your remark is, for instance, the Baroness Grenwitz. What has she not read! German, French, English, and Swedish; sacred books and profane books; the best and the worst books. To-day I find her reading Rousseau's Confessions, to-morrow a catchpenny novel; to-day she studies Schleiermacher's religious discourses, to-morrow she is deep in the last horror by Dumas or Eugene Sue. In small matters she has good sense enough, but as soon as you approach the higher mysteries of our life here below, or as soon even as the question arises how a general conclusion can be obtained from the mass of details, she begins to talk nonsense, and produces such foolish aristocratic commonplace phrases that my head swims." "This tendency of the baroness, I should think, does not serve to make your position in Grenwitz very pleasant?" "Not exactly," replied Oswald, lightly; "but I try to weaken the addition of wormwood by avoiding as much as I can the philosophical effusions of the baroness, and by confining my intercourse with the family generally to the least possible frequency." "But with all consideration to your time and your disposition, might you not have fixed these limits a little too narrow?" said the doctor, knocking off the ashes of his cigar. "How so?" asked Oswald, not without some surprise.