To his astonishment, his dissatisfied astonishment, she was rather silent and did not talk about herself. "I have been trying to understand," she said after awhile, "how it happens that you are full of thoughts, and all the other people I know and I myself have none." "Oh," he said, "dear Mamsell, it is simply because you have not loved life warmly enough." "Not warmly enough--?" she said thoughtfully. "Yes," he said, "that's the explanation. You people take everything in such a cool, such a proper way. You never come to the boiling-point, and so there are no thoughts. When you are young, you are just young--without the bliss, the glow, the blessed consuming consciousness. Young people ought to be positively drunk with happy thoughts! If I were a girl and had such a wonderful head of red hair, and limbs of perfect, rounded beauty--by the Lord above! I should run about joyously, in full consciousness of my powers, letting not a single hour of the day be lost. I should taste my youth with all its feelings and thoughts, its sins and its glories. And when old age came on, I should throw myself on the ground and rage and moan and tear my clothes and strew ashes upon my head, and die of grief. But you others, because you don't think and don't know, you are able to live through a dull, proper youth and a comfortable old age. If people knew what a thing youth is, there'd be no holding the world. All that was young would be brewing and fermenting to such a point that no ruler in the world would be able to keep it down." "Then the world doesn't seem to be made for thinking?" asked the girl seriously. "No," he answered passionately. "If everybody thought, instead of only one in hundreds of thousands, it would be an impossible place. Just imagine, fair lady, what would happen if women began to think! It's inconceivable. The greatest revolution in history would break out; a volcanic eruption would convulse society. It's quite right--only the few are supposed to think. There must be dead bodies without will, to live mechanically, to do mechanically what they are told. A thinking world--no, thank you! No, Mamsell, we'll stick to the old system." So they walked along through the splendor of spring, until music sounded in their ears. "Where does it come from?" asked the engraver. "From Rödchen," said she, absent-mindedly. "Let us go there. Dance-music ... I shouldn't mind ... among the peasant-folk ... How would it be?" "These are not peasants," she said. "They're Weimar people who come out to amuse themselves in the woods. I wonder what's going on ..." "We'll go and see," he answered. So they went down a narrow path through the thick woods. The music sounded more clearly amidst the May green. And now they stood near the forester's low house, and saw the long gray benches set all about, and people dancing under the trees in the last rays of the sun. Beate greeted the forester's family, and introduced her guest to them.