ndesigning phrases, her looks glance towards heaven, and to
the right and left, and all the words and all the looks swim like a
hundred hooks in the stream of the insipid conversation, and the
youngsters shoot, now after this, now after that line, wriggling and
playing, till, at last, though it be some weeks first, one or other of
them is fastened. So they have hooked for Kunigunde that delicate
whiting, and forthwith put it into his head that the plump girl is a
great deal too good for him, so that he pulls like a repentant sinner
at the car of matrimony, and cannot help feeling himself honoured, that
the lofty being has stooped to him; now Clara, Clementine, and the
earthly-minded Dorothea are still to be settled, nay I will not
warrant, that the well-stricken proselyte-maker herself does not one of
these days shape her a bridegroom out of some pious stripling, and
shuffle a settlement into his hands instead of the catechism. Ay, ay!
For better, for worse! How all the world scampers, as if they were
blind and deaf, under the melancholy yoke, and sacrifice freedom and
fancy to the evil genius, which almost always debases a man into a
slave."

"You are an abominable scoffer," said the officer; "out of a libertine
humour you hate marriage, and desire now that all men should live as
licentious freethinking bachelors, and because your taste is not suited
to that circle, you slander those persons, who are exalted above every
calumny."

"Quite martial!" cried the Baron. "And yet I shall prove to be right,
and perhaps you yourself, sooner or later, when you are forced, like a
squirrel, to make the same orthodox springs over and over again at the
end of your chain, in order to crack the nuts which your wife allows
you, will sigh, 'Ah! had I but believed my resolute friend Willen!'"

"No, sir," said the counsellor with warmth, "your view of the subject
proceeds from nothing but despair: nay, you do not even believe
yourself."

"For aught I care," cried the other, "it may be that a creature totally
different from myself is speaking out of me; for that is often the case
in life, and, even among those apostolical folks themselves, there
often peeps a something like an ape, out of their fringed and stiffened
drapery. Is it not so? Especially out of that elderly maiden, the too
unworldly Miss Erhard, that incomparable mistress of the art of
education? She has set the pattern of a close cap of inward sentiment
for the whole fami