o the sky.

Topandy shrugged his shoulders at her.

"Bah! you goose, reading is not for girls. Women are best off when they
know nothing."

Then he laughed in her face.

Czipra ran weeping out of the laboratory.

Lorand pitied the poor creature, who, dressed in silks and finery, did
not know her letters, and who was incapable of raising her voice to God.
He was in a mood, through long solitude, for pitying others; under a
strange name, known to nobody, separated from the world, he was able to
forget the lofty dreams to which a smooth career had pointed, and which
fate, at his first steps, had mocked. He had given up the idea that the
world should acknowledge this title: "a great patriot, who is the holder
of a high office." He who does not desire this should keep to the
ploughshare. Ambition should only have well-regulated roads, and success
should only begin with a lower office in the state. But he whose hobby
it is to murmur, will find a fine career in field labor; and he who
wishes to bury himself, will find himself supplied, in life, with a
beautiful, romantic, flowery wheat-covered cemetery by the fields, from
the centre of which the happy dead creatures of life cheerfully mock at
those who weary themselves and create a disturbance--with the idea that
they are doing something, whereas their end is the same as that of the
rest of mankind.

Lorand was even beginning to grow indifferent to the awful obligation
that lay before him at the end of the appointed time. It was still afar
off. Before then a man might die peacefully and quietly; perhaps that
other who guarded the secret might pass away ere then. And perhaps the
years at the plough would harden the skin of a man's soul, as it did of
his face and hands, so that he would come to ridicule a wager, which in
his youthful over-enthusiasm he would have fulfilled; a wager the
refusal to accept which would merely win the commendation of everybody.
And if any one could say the reverse, how could he find him to say it to
his face? As regards his family at home, he was fairly at his ease. He
often received letters from Dezsoe (Desiderius), under another address;
they were all well at home, and treated the fate of the expelled son
with good grace. He also learned that Madame Balnokhazy had not returned
to her husband, but had gone abroad with that actor with whom she had
previously been acquainted. This also he had wiped out from his memory.
His whole mind was a perf