For fourteen years I have looked on at your spirited educational methods in silence. They were contrary to my ideas. I had always lived in the conviction that a child was not a plaything; a child should have a claim upon our most earnest efforts. But, I said to myself, if the spirit and the grace of the one parent are able to compensate for the serious maxims of the other, they may be given preference over the serious maxims.----I am not reproaching you, Fanny, but don't stand in my way when I seek to right your injustice and mine toward the lad. FRAU GABOR. I will block the way for you as long as a warm drop of blood beats in me. My child would be lost in the House of Correction. A criminal nature might be bettered in such an institution. I don't know. A fine natured man would just as surely turn into a criminal, like the plants when they are kept from sun and light. I am conscious of no injustice on my part. To-day, as always, I thank heaven that it showed me the way to awaken righteousness of character and nobility of thought in my child. What has he done which is so frightful? It doesn't occur to me to apologize for him----now that they have hunted him out of school, he bears no fault! And if it was his fault he has paid for it. You may know better. You may be entirely right theoretically. But I cannot allow my only child to be forcibly hunted to death. HERR GABOR. That doesn't depend on us, Fanny. That is the risk we took with our happiness. He who is too weak to march stops by the wayside. And, in the end, it is not the worst when what was certain to come comes in time to be bettered. Heaven protect us from that! It is our duty to strengthen the loiterer as long as reason supplies a means.----That they have hunted him out of school is not his own fault. If they hadn't hunted him out of school, that wouldn't have been his fault, either!----You are so lighthearted. You perceive inconsiderable trifles when the question concerns a fundamental injury to character. You women are not accustomed to judge such things. Anyone who can write what Melchior wrote must be rotten to the core of his being. The mark is plain. A half-healthy nature wouldn't do such a thing. None of us are saints. Each of us wanders from the straight path. His writing, on the contrary, tramples on principle. His writing is no evidence of a chance slip in the usual way; it sets forth with dreadful plainness and a frankly definite purpose that natural longing, that propensity for immorality, because it is immorality. His writing manifests that exceptional state of spiritual corruption which we jurists classify under the term “moral imbecility.”----If anything can be done in his case, I am not able to say. If we want to preserve a glimmer of hope, and keep our spotless consciences as the parents of the victim, it is time for us to go to work determinedly in earnest.--Don't let us contend any more, Fanny! I feel how hard it is for you.