Honest Anna Braun, in some measure, felt this difference; and while she half-feared, half-worshipped Paulina, as a sort of dainty nymph—an Undine—she took refuge with me, as a being all mortal, and of easier mood. A book we liked well to read and translate was Schiller’s Ballads; Paulina soon learned to read them beautifully; the Fräulein would listen to her with a broad smile of pleasure, and say her voice sounded like music. She translated them, too, with a facile flow of language, and in a strain of kindred and poetic fervour: her cheek would flush, her lips tremblingly smile, her beauteous eyes kindle or melt as she went on. She learnt the best by heart, and would often recite them when we were alone together. One she liked well was “Des Mädchens Klage:” that is, she liked well to repeat the words, she found plaintive melody in the sound; the sense she would criticise. She murmured, as we sat over the fire one evening:— Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück, Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück, Ich habe gelebt und geliebet! “Lived and loved!” said she, “is that the summit of earthly happiness, the end of life—to love? I don’t think it is. It may be the extreme of mortal misery, it may be sheer waste of time, and fruitless torture of feeling. If Schiller had said to _be_ loved, he might have come nearer the truth. Is not that another thing, Lucy, to be loved?” “I suppose it may be: but why consider the subject? What is love to you? What do you know about it?” She crimsoned, half in irritation, half in shame. “Now, Lucy,” she said, “I won’t take that from you. It may be well for papa to look on me as a baby: I rather prefer that he should thus view me; but _you_ know and shall learn to acknowledge that I am verging on my nineteenth year.” “No matter if it were your twenty-ninth; we will anticipate no feelings by discussion and conversation; we will not talk about love.” “Indeed, indeed!” said she—all in hurry and heat—“you may think to check and hold me in, as much as you please; but I _have_ talked about it, and heard about it too; and a great deal and lately, and disagreeably and detrimentally: and in a way you wouldn’t approve.” And the vexed, triumphant, pretty, naughty being laughed. I could not discern what she meant, and I would not ask her: I was nonplussed. Seeing, however, the utmost innocence in her countenance—combined with some transient perverseness and petulance—I said at last,— “Who talks to you disagreeably and detrimentally on such matters? Who that has near access to you would dare to do it?” “Lucy,” replied she more softly, “it is a person who makes me miserable sometimes; and I wish she would keep away—I don’t want her.” “But who, Paulina, can it be? You puzzle me much.” “It is—it is my cousin Ginevra. Every time she has leave to visit Mrs. Cholmondeley she calls here, and whenever she finds me alone she begins to talk about her admirers. Love, indeed! You should hear all she has to say about love.”