"I always have my hands full," she began. "As I unfortunately no longer have any household cares, I willingly take as much of the work of the different clubs and societies to which I belong, as others wish to discard. Ah! Doctor, it affords a great deal of pleasure to have a crowd of deaf and dumb or neglected or orphaned children thank you for their warm, new clothes; yet a single child of one's own, who need not even be deaf and dumb or neglected, or even specially grateful, would bestow a very different kind of happiness. A substitute is never the thing itself. And that's the very reason why it makes me so sad, that the only child I could love almost as my own, avoids me so strangely; she's not cold or ungrateful, but I learn nothing about the best things that may be in her nature, and cannot impart the best of mine, since she does not know how to receive them." "Are you speaking of my pupil?" The Frau Professorin did not answer immediately; she sat in silence gazing into vacancy, with her pretty white hands folded in her lap. "No one has ever caused me so much trouble," she continued, "and yet she has so much amiability, goodness, unselfishness, and independence. But that's just it, the one thing needful, the one thing lacking--you're a philosopher, my dear Doctor, but I hope not one of those whose knowledge has deprived them of faith. And this strange girl--it is not the pride of superior knowledge that makes her unbelieving; no one has a more modest opinion of her own acquirements. But it's in the blood. You ought to have known her mother, whose character she has inherited, trait for trait. Nothing has ever been more mysterious to me, than how my old friend, the artist, who has such a living need of God, could be so happy with this woman, who made no secret of her want of religion, and once when I asked her the direct question, frankly acknowledged: 'that she really did not know whether there was any God at all.' She would not have denied it; but I never disclosed it, I don't know whether she made such confessions to her husband, but I almost think he would not have been puzzled by them; he loved her very dearly. And to be sure, no one could help loving her; I was unable to do so myself, long after I had given up trying to lead her to the light which has guided me through all the depths and shallows of this world. To be sure the fact that she was a Jewess, rendered it difficult for her to obtain a knowledge of the truth. But if she had only been a devout Jewess! I respect all genuine convictions. But she, on the contrary, confessed to me with the calmest possible face, that she knew no more of all the mysteries of life in her thirtieth year than she did in her tenth; she did not _understand_ either this world or the next, and had no desire to fathom their secrets; her beautiful, bright, thoughtless present, with her husband and child, was all sufficient. I fairly started when this was first uttered so plainly.