Meantime Herr Kosch was roaming about the courtyard and stables, and finally, coming into the garden, he spied his young hostess. "Well," he said to himself, "suppose we make an exception, and see how long it will be before she begins the yawning game. It'll be worth the trouble, after all." So it came about that he talked to her as to one of his own kind, as he would have talked with his comrades over the familiar table in the tavern of an evening--although he had never got further with them than to be considered an eccentric, possibly dangerous fellow: on two very different grounds, first because they didn't understand him, and then ... he went easily for this reason into a passion. So now he took from his young hostess's heart the weight that he had put there the previous evening by his mocking and contemptuous manner. He let himself go, spoke after his own manner, and gave up the jesting, playful tone which he always had ready for women. She listened to him with silent attention, no matter what he talked about. The wide leaps his mind took did not seem to weary her in the following. To his astonishment, she did not yawn once. "She must be very much in love," he said to himself. To her, among other things, he said: "I'm glad you've got your garden so wild and natural--nothing clipped and trimmed, no rectangles, circles, or other geometrical figures, from which one deduces at once that one has to do with men of a very low grade of intelligence. To take delight in squares and circles is a bad sign. Who wants to have intercourse with cave-men? No--you've got a very decent garden that betrays nothing." "But I know," said Beate, "that people have lived here who got no great pleasure out of life. If my mother had been happier, I believe she would have laid out a few tulip-beds--which might have been round or square, as the notion took her." "Yes--well," said the engraver, "one must allow people to be happy in their own way. But it's a horrible way. Just think--a poor devil wants to create something in the joy of his heart; and he scratches like a chicken in the earth, longish or oval, until he makes a bed, and is proud and happy. That's the way life is--all a miserable fraud. There's eating--and most people understand how to do that fairly well--but outside of that there's little except scratching up the earth. Have you, for example, ever thought anything, my pretty young lady? I don't mean whether it's going to be fine today, or whether to accept Müller or Meier, or whether the blue dress is more becoming to you than the pink one, or whether there is an eternal life or not. I mean, did a real light ever break upon you about anything, contrary to the opinion of the rest of the world? And did this new light give you such immeasurable joy that you wanted to do a war-dance with cries of triumph!" "No, Herr Kosch, I have never had such a joy," said the girl. "You see, Mamsell," he laughed--"and you wanted to talk with me!"