enlisted truth on its side. It needed
no arguing, and he gave it none; the spirit that inspired also
vindicated it. I could not help recalling the agonies and struggles
which my passion for the Countess von Sempach had occasioned me. At
first I thought that I would tell him about this affair, but I found
myself ashamed. And I was ashamed because I had resisted the passion; it
would have been very easy to tell him had I yielded. But the merry eyes
would twinkle in amusement at my high-strung folly, as I had seen them
twinkle at my brother-in-law's stolidity. He said something incidentally
which led me to fancy that he had heard about the Countess and had
received a mistaken impression of the facts; I did not correct what
appeared to be his idea. I neither confirmed nor contradicted it. I said
to myself that it was nothing to me what notion he had of my conduct; in
reality I did not desire him to know the truth. I clung to the
conviction that I could justify what had seemed my hard-won victory,
but I did not feel as though I could justify it to him. He would laugh,
be a little puzzled, and dismiss the matter as inexplicable. His own
creed was not swathed in clouds, nor dim, nor hard clearly to see and
picture; it was all very straightforward. Properly it was no creed; it
was a course of action based on a mode of feeling which neither demanded
nor was patient of defence or explanation. The circumstances of my life
were such that never before had I been brought into contact with a
similar temperament or a similar practice. When they were thus suddenly
presented to me they seemed endowed with a most attractive simplicity,
with a naturalness, with what I must call a wholesomeness; the
objections I felt to be overstrained, unreal, morbid. Varvilliers' feet
were on firm ground; on what shaking uncertain bog of mingled impulses,
emotions, fancies, and delusions might not those who blamed him be found
themselves to stand?

I am confident that he spoke without premeditation, with no desire to
win a proselyte, merely as man to man, in unaffected intimacy. I think
that he was rather sorry for me, having detected a gloominess in my view
of life and a tendency to moody and fretful introspection. Once or twice
he referred, in passing jest, to the difference of national
characteristics, the German tendency to make love by crying (so he put
it) as contrasted with the laughing philosophy of his own country. At
the end he apologized for ta