"And yet it is so. I have made up my mind to be always unreservedly candid towards you, as you are towards me; at least to try to be so; and therefore I can keep nothing from you. Formerly, when you seemed to be beyond my reach as far as the stars in heaven, I often longed for other human hearts to warm me, and to let me feel by their pulsations that everything around me was not as dead as I felt; or I threw myself into wild excesses and neck-breaking adventures, in order to feel at least that I was still living. But now all that has suddenly changed. Since there has come to me the faintest ray of hope that you may yet some time consent to be mine, the world has recovered all its youthful beauty in my eyes; but now I should also like to see the fountain from which I have drunk this water of youth, free of all admixture and undimmed. As you are all in all to me, so I should like to be all to you; to see you have no other desire than to be loved--loved more and more--as I have no other desire than to love you, more and more. What is the rest of the world to us? I have forgotten it; it does not exist for me any more!" Melitta had let this storm of passion rush over her with bowed head. When Oldenburg paused she took the diary, which lay open before her on the table, turned over a few leaves, and said: "Man strives according to his nature after the general and infinite; in woman, who stands in every respect nearer to nature, the characteristic feature of every being, self-love, is much more distinctly marked. Man represents the centrifugal power of the moral world; woman the centripetal power. If the former had the government, the world would soon be in the clouds altogether; if woman ruled, we should never rise above the top of the wheat-blades that nod over the lark's nest in the furrow. The way to reconcile the two tendencies is love. When he loves a beautiful woman, man learns that he is not merely a denizen of the spiritual world; and when a woman loves a noble man, she learns that there are higher interests than those of the domestic hearth. They must complement each other; she must remind him that mankind is made up of men; he must teach even the most gifted among us first to spell and then to read fluently the great words of our day: 'Liberty and Fraternity.'" She closed the book and glanced up at Oldenburg, who stood at a little distance from her, his arms crossed on his bosom. "You were right not to let me become faithless to my own convictions," he said; "and I should like to know but this one thing--whether your zeal to convert me is quite pure, or whether the priestess is not anxious to direct the eyes of the sinner to the idol itself, because their longing glances directed at her begin to be a burden to her?" "Oldenburg!"