Thus spoke the passionate woman amid kisses and caresses--now jubilant, now melancholy, now in broken stammering words, and now in winged words of eloquence, like a young little bird that would like to sing forth all that is in its beating bosom at once, and yet cannot accomplish more than a soft twittering, and now and then a clear note. She could not understand why Oswald refused to visit her openly the next day, and thenceforth to show himself at her house whenever she saw company. She fancied such intercourse would be perfectly charming. "Cloten is often absent for half the day. When you are once introduced at our house we can spend the most lovely hours together undisturbed." "Never!" "Why never? You do not want to see me?" "I should like nothing better; but the question is: Can I do it? But how can I return into your society, after leaving in the manner in which I did? It has always been my principle never again to set foot across the threshold of a house where I have been one insulted, purposely or accidentally; for what has been done once may be done again. And if it is not done, confidence and intimacy must needs be gone, and they are as little apt to return as innocence." "But why do you mind the others? Those I do not wish to see and to notice, I never do see or notice." "You can do that; but don't you see that that is utterly impossible in my case? Or do you think Baron Barnewitz, young Grieben, or whoever else belongs to that clique, would leave me unnoticed and unobserved?" "They shall not come to our house; not one of them shall come. I will receive nobody; and those whom I receive, I will receive so that they will not call again!" "My dear child, those are all pretty bubbles, which would burst at the very first breath of reality. And if you were really to enter the lists against your society for my sake--where after all you would be infallibly worsted--would your husband make the same sacrifice for the sake of a man whom he certainly does not love, and has good reason not to love?" "Arthur does whatever I wish; I can ask Arthur to do anything." "And if he were such a fool," said Oswald, violently; "I will not play this blind-man's-buff. If your husband really loves you, so much the worse for you and me and him. I know that you women possess in such cases the marvellous power of not letting the right hand know what the left hand does, but we men are made differently; at least I am. I do not talk to you of moral scruples, which we manage at needs to overcome when we thoroughly despise the man whose confidence we abuse; but I should suffer unspeakable anguish, for which all the delights of love would be no compensation, if I saw with my own eyes how the man whom I despise was placing his arm in coarse familiarity around your waist; if I were to leave you and knew that you--oh, I cannot, I will not speak of what I do not dare to think."