"What now do we get from all this?" said Idoine, by and by, and near the village. "We foresee that we should be too tender, and yet we give ourselves up. For that very reason men call us weak. They prepare themselves for their future by mere hardenings, and only we do it with mere softening processes." "What shall one do, then," said Julienne,--"leap into rivers, up mountains, on horseback, and so on?" "No," said Idoine. "For I see it by my peasant-women: they suffer in their nerves, with all their muscular labor, as well as others. With the mind, I imagine, we must all do and seek more; but we always let only the fingers and eyes exercise and stir themselves. The heart itself knows nothing thereof, and does what it pleases the while: it dreams, weeps, bleeds, dances. A little philosophizing would be of service to us; but, as it is, we give ourselves up, bound, to all feelings, and if we think, it is merely to give them additional aid." They came back into the village; it was full of busy evening noise. Children came dancing to meet Idoine; alp-horns sounded in from the heights, and from the houses flutes and songs. Idoine gave cheerfully evening commands. "How easily, after all," said she, "outward tranquillity breaks up the internal. A busied heart is like a vessel of water swung round; hold it still, and it runs over." Julienne had already several times, but in vain, snatched at the helm of the hour and the conversation, to carry out her plan; now, when she observed Linda's silence, emotion, and dreaminess, she fancied she had hit upon the long-expected, favorable moment when some words which Idoine let drop on the subject of marriage would find in Linda a softened soil for their roots. By the easy turn of a eulogy which she pronounced upon Idoine for her spirited opposition against launching into a hated princely marriage, and her gain of a perpetual young life, she brought the Countess to the point of expressing her heretical hatred of marriage, and saying that it laid the flower painfully fastened with a sharp iron ring to its frame; that love without freedom, and from duty, was nothing but hypocrisy and hatred; and that acting according to morality, so called, was as much as if one should choose to think or poetize according to a system of logic which he had before him, and that the energy, the will, the heart of love, was something higher than morals and logic.