MELCHIOR--Not all thru. MORITZ--We’re just at the Walpurgisnacht. MRS. GABOR--I should have waited a year or two more, if I’d been you, before reading that. MELCHIOR--I don’t know any book, Mama, that I’ve found so much that was beautiful in. Why shouldn’t I have read it? MRS. GABOR--Because you can’t understand it. MELCHIOR--How can you know that, Mama? I feel plainly enough that I’m not able yet to grasp it in its full sublimity, but.... MORITZ--We always read it together. That makes understanding it vastly easier. MRS. GABOR--You are old enough, Melchior, to be able to judge what is good for you and what isn’t. Do whatever you feel you can justify. I shall be the first to realize, and be glad, if you never give me any reason to have to withhold anything from you. I only wanted to remind you that even the best can do harm if one is still too immature to appraise it rightly. I shall always rather put my trust in you than in any possible set of educational rules.--If you want anything else, children, come and call me, Melchior: I shall be in my bedroom. [_Exit._] MORITZ--Your Mama meant the story of Gretchen. MELCHIOR--Have we lingered even a moment over that! MORITZ--Faust himself can’t have been more cold-blooded getting thru it! MELCHIOR--After all, that villainy isn’t the climax of the poem. Faust could have promised the girl marriage, he could have deserted her directly after, without being one whit less guilty in my eyes. Gretchen could have died of a broken heart for all the difference I’d see.--When you behold how intensely everyone always looks first for that sort of thing, you might think the whole world revolved round penis and vulva.[2] MORITZ--To be frank with you, Melchior, I’ve had exactly that feeling since I read your paper. It fell out at my feet in the first days of vacation. I had my Plötz [a French grammar] in my hand.--I bolted the door and ran through your quivering lines like a frightened owl flying through a blazing wood. I think I read most of it with my eyes shut. At your explanations a stream of vague memories rang in my ears like a song one used to hum joyously to one’s self in childhood, and at the brink of death hears from the mouth of another, and is appalled.--My sympathy was aroused most by what you wrote about the girl’s part, I shall never get over the impression that made. I’m sure, Melchior, to have to suffer wrong is sweeter than to do wrong. Blamelessly to have to undergo so sweet a wrong seems to me the essence of every earthly bliss. MELCHIOR--I don’t want my bliss given me as a charity! MORITZ--But why not? MELCHIOR--I don’t want anything that I haven’t had to struggle and win for myself.