Thereupon she introduced the two to several houses; everywhere they found well-whitened, neatly-ordered apartments, flowers and vine-clusters over the windows, fair women and children, and now a flute, now a violin, and nowhere a spinning child. In all she had charges to give, and what seemed a mere walk was also business. She showed a sharp insight through people, and their perverted, crooked ways, and a talent for business, which possessed and united at once the universal and the particular. "I should be glad, of course," said she, "to have only pleasures and amusements about me; but without labor and seriousness the best good of the world dies: not so much as a real play is possible without real earnestness." Linda commended her for training all to music,--that real moonlight in every gloomy night of life. "Without poesy and art," she added, "the spirit grows mossy and wooden in this earthly clime." "O what were mine without tones!" said Idoine, glowingly. Linda inquired about the right of citizenship in this pleasant state. "It is mostly possessed by Swiss families," said Idoine, "with whom I became acquainted at hearth and home on my travels. Immediately after the French women I rank my Swiss." Julienne replied, "You repeat to me riddles." She solved them for her; and Linda, who had been in France shortly after her, confirmed it, that there, among the women of a certain higher tone, to whom no Crebillon had ever come up, a development prevailed, unusual in Germany, of the most delicate morality, almost holiness. "Only," added Linda, "they had in morality, as in art, prejudices of fine taste, and more delicacy than genius." They went out through the village, toward the loveliest evening sun; Alpine horns responded to each other on the mountains, and in the vale gay old men went to light employments. These Idoine greeted with peculiar love. "Because," she said, "there was nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness on an old face; and among country people it was always the sign of a well-regulated and pious life." Linda opened her heart to the golden scene before her, and said: "How must all this delight in a poem! But I know not what I have to object to the fact that it now exists so in the real reality."