"There he still sat in his sofa-corner as before, and had smoked his cigar down to a tiny stump; but in her embroidery there was a flower which had not been there before. "'Why do you shrug your shoulders so contemptuously?' asked Martha, and Robert added, 'It seems I do not meet with her ladyship's gracious approval.' "'So,' thought I, 'for all my kindness I get sneers into the bargain,' and went out slamming the door after me. That same night, I, foolish young creature that I was, lay awake till nearly morning, and pictured to myself how I, Olga Bremer, would have behaved had I been in the place of those two. First I was Robert, then Martha; I felt, I spoke, I acted for them, and through the silence of my bedroom there sounded the passionate whisperings of ardent, world-despising love. "As things were much too straightforward to please me, I invented a number of additional obstacles--our parents' refusal, nocturnal meetings at the frontier trench, surprise by the Cossacks, imprisonment, paternal, maledictions, flight, and finally death together in the waves; for only hereby, so it seemed to me, could true love be worthily sealed and confirmed. "When I got up in the morning my head whirled, and yellow and green lights danced before my eyes. "Martha clasped her hands in horror at my appearance, and Robert, who was sitting again for a change in a sofa-corner, and once again sending forth clouds of smoke all around, remarked-- "'Have you been crying or dancing all night?' "'Dancing,' I replied, 'on the Brocken, with other witches.' "'One positively cannot get a sensible word out of the girl,' he said, shaking his head. "'As you cry into the wood,' replied I. "'Oh! I am as still as a mouse already,' he remarked, laughing, 'else I shall get such a dish of aspersion to begin the day with, as I have never swallowed in all my life.' "Martha looked at me reproachfully, and I ran out into the park where it was darkest and hid my burning face in the cool mass of leaves. "I was near crying. "'So this is my fate,' I moaned, 'to be misunderstood by the whole world, to stand there alone and despised though my heart is full of passionate love, to wither unheeded in some corner, while every other being finds its companion and stills its longings in an ardent embrace.' "Yes, I had so vividly pictured to myself Martha's love that I had finally come to think myself the heroine of it. "Thus, of course, disenchantment could not fail to come. "And if only the two had made some further effort to keep pace with the flights of my imagination! But the longer Robert remained in our house, the more I watched Martha's intercourse with him, the more did I become convinced that all interest was unnecessarily wasted upon them. "She--the type of a timid, insipid, housewife, subject to any fatality of every-day life. "He--a clumsy, dull, work-a-day fellow, incapable of any degree of emotion.