Susanna. He
especially avoided looking at her, or speaking to her directly.

"'How is Fraeulein Mattoni getting on?' broke in Stuermer in the midst of
a well-turned sentence of Klaus's about the recent attempts to make
beet-root sugar.

"'Well!' replied Anna Maria; 'she is reading an old family history which
I hunted up the other day, and enjoying your delicious apricots. Thank
you for them, Stuermer; they give Susanna great pleasure.'

"Then the conversation turned upon the lately deceased Duke of Weimar,
Charles Augustus, and from him to his celebrated friend, Goethe, of whom
Stuermer affirmed that he was intending to marry again after the death of
his wife. Anna Maria rejected the idea incredulously; she could not
believe that he, at his great age, would be so foolish. She was a sworn
enemy to Goethe. Her plain, straightforward mind had been disagreeably
affected by Werther; such an overflow of feeling could but seem strange
to her. Goethe's numerous love-affairs set him out in a light which
brought the ideal conception of him down to the atmosphere of common
mortals. That genius draws different boundaries, that a fiery spirit
like his was not to be measured by the common standard, did not occur to
her, and so she now indignantly shook her head.

"'A fable!' I, too, cried, smiling.

"'Not at all,' rejoined Stuermer; 'I have it from Von N----, who is
correctly informed, depend upon it!'

"'My!' said Klaus, 'he must have become an old icicle by this time,
scarcely able to go among people any more.'

"'A man who has created a Gretchen ossify?' threw in Stuermer. 'Never!'

"'And a Werther?' said I, in joke.

"'Werther is insupportable!' declared Anna Maria, 'bombastic, overdrawn!
A man who behaves like Werther is in my eyes no man at all, but a
weakling!'

"Stuermer's dark eyes looked quietly over at her. 'Your opinion, Fraeulein
von Hegewitz, is surely a rare one among women. A woman usually
discovers from her standpoint, and naturally, that with a lost love the
value of life is gone, and why should not this be the case with a man
as well? Of course, in a man's occupation, in the demands which his life
makes of him, there are a thousand aids offered to enable him more
quickly to recover from such a pain. But to regard it purely
objectively, that demands such a cool manner of contemplation that I am
fain to believe that those who thus judge do not know what loving really
means.'

"At these last words Anna