The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,--which she postponed only for Liana's sake,--remain single, if only for this reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate, Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and flying cold,--that fire which, like the electric, always twice destroys,--in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty, or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without parental consent? With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds, which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming. For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.