"_Could_ I, I ask you? Cleaned out, stripped, a teacher's job, one pipe of tobacco on Sundays--what are you thinking of? I couldn't do her such a wrong. But all I say is: can you understand her?" "And what became of her afterwards?" "Good Lord, you don't answer my question! She married a captain. That was the year after. A captain in the artillery. Your health!" Johannes said: "They say some women are always looking for an object for their compassion. If the man is getting on well they hate him and think themselves superfluous; if things go against him and he is down they crow over him and say: here I am." "But why didn't she accept me in the good days? I had the prospects of a little god." "Goodness knows. She wanted to wait till you were brought low." "But I wasn't brought low. Never. I kept my pride and sent her about her business. What do you say to that?" Johannes said nothing. "But perhaps you're right," said the old Tutor. "Yes, by God and all his angels, what you say is right," he exclaimed with sudden excitement and took another drink. "She took an old captain at last; she nurses him, cuts up his food for him and is master of the house. A captain in the artillery." Johannes looked up. Victoria sat with her glass in her hand staring in his direction. She held her glass high in the air. He felt a shock all through him and seized his glass too. His hand shook. Then she called aloud to his neighbour and laughed; it was the Tutor's name she called. Johannes put down his glass in humiliation and sat with an embarrassed smile on his face. Everybody had looked at him. The old Tutor was touched to tears by this friendly attention of his pupil's. He made haste to empty his glass. "And here I am, an old man," he continued, "here I am tramping the earth, alone and unknown. That has been my lot. Nobody knows what there is in me; but nobody has ever heard me grumble. How is that?--do you know the turtledove? Isn't it the turtledove, that melancholy being which makes the gay, bright spring water muddy before it drinks it?" "I don't know." "No, I dare say not. But it is. And I do the same. I did not get her whom I should have had; but I am not altogether without joys for all that. Only I stir up the mud in them. Every time I stir up the mud. Then I can't be beaten by the disappointment afterwards. There you see Victoria. She drank with me just now. I have been her tutor; now she's to be married and I'm glad about it, it gives me a purely personal sense of happiness as if she was my own daughter. Now perhaps I shall be tutor to her children. Oh yes, there are really a number of joys left in life. But what you said about compassion and woman and the man brought low--the more I think about it, the more you are right. Yes, God knows you are.... Excuse me a second." He got up, seized his glass and went along to Victoria. He was already a little unsteady on his legs and stooped a great deal.