No one she had ever seen was so vivacious, so alive as he. Her slumbering fancy had awakened at the sound of his voice and the feel of his warm breath. She felt that people owed him a great deal; and since they did not seem inclined to pay their debts, it was her duty to make restitution to Daniel for their neglect. She could not survey the ways of his art: the musician in him made neither a strange nor a special appeal to her. She grasped and felt only him himself; to her he was Daniel. She grasped and felt only the man who was born to do lofty, the loftiest, deeds and who passed by the base and evil in men in silence; who knew that he had been chosen but was obliged to renounce the privilege of ruling; who was always in full armour, ready to defend a threatened sanctuary. Of such a man, of such a knight and warrior, she had dreamt even when a child. For although she looked at things and circumstances with the eyes of truth, her soul had always been full of secret dreams and visions. Back of her unceasing and unfading activity the genii of romanticism had been spinning their bright-coloured threads; it was they that had formed the glass case in which she had lived for so long, impervious to the touch of mortal hand, immune to the flames of love. The morning following that night she explained to her friend that she was going home. Martha tried in vain to get her to stay: she was almost ill with longing. Martha let her go; she had the very saddest of thoughts concerning Eleanore’s future; for the unhappy incidents of that unhappy home had reached Martha’s sensitive ears. She did not worry because of moral principles; she was not that kind of a woman. She worried over Eleanore out of genuine affection: it pained her to know that she could no longer admire Eleanore. X In the meanwhile Daniel had told his wife that a child of his was living with his mother in Eschenbach, and that he had known nothing about it until Eleanore took him over there. He told her the child’s name and how old it was and who its mother was, and gave her a detailed description of that celebrated New Year’s Night on which he had embraced the maid. He told her how he had stood out in front of her house that night and longed for her with all his senses, and how he felt, when he looked at little Eva, as if Providence had only seemed to use the body of a strange woman, and that Eva was in reality Gertrude’s own child. To this Gertrude replied: “I never want to see that child.” “You will be ashamed of having made this remark once you do see the child,” replied Daniel. “You should not be envious of a creature whom God brought into the world so that the world may be more beautiful.” “Don’t speak of God!” said Gertrude quickly and with uplifted hand. Then, after a pause, during which Daniel looked at her angrily, she added with a painful smile: “The very idea: I, jealous, envious! O no, Daniel.”