carriages from the streets
down in the city. In the compassion that Eleanore after all felt for
Eberhard she sensed the harshness of her unqualified refusal. She looked
at him courageously, firmly, and said: "It is not obstinacy on my part,
Eberhard; nor is it stupid anxiety, nor imagination, nor lack of
respect. Truth to tell I have a very high opinion of you. But there must
be something quite unnatural about me, for you see that I loathe the
very idea of getting married. I detest the thought of living with a man.
I like you, but when you touch me as you did a little while ago when you
kissed my hand, a shudder runs through my whole body."

Eberhard looked at her in astonishment; he was morose, too.

She continued: "It has been in me since my childhood; perhaps I was born
with it, just as other people are born with a physical defect. It may be
that I have been this way ever since a certain day in my life. It was an
autumn evening in Pappenheim, where my aunt then lived. My sister
Gertrude and I were walking in a great fruit garden; we came to a thorn
hedge, and sitting by the hedge was an old woman. My father and mother
were far away, and the old woman said to my sister, then about seven: Be
on your guard against everything that sings and rings. To me she said:
Be careful never to have a child. The next day the woman was found dead
under the hedge. She was over ninety years old, and for more than fifty
years she had peddled herbs in Altmuehltal. I naturally had not the
vaguest idea what she meant at the time by 'having a child,' but her
remark stuck in my heart like an arrow. It grew up with me; it became a
part of me. And when I learned what it meant, it was a picture by the
side of the picture of death. Now you must not think that I have gone
through life thus far filled with a feeling of despicable fear. Not at
all. I simply have no desires. The idea does not attract me. If it ever
does, many questions will I ask about life and death! I will laugh at
the old woman under the hedge and do what I must."

As she spoke these last words, her face took on a strangely chaste and
fanciful expression. Eberhard could not take his eyes from her. "Ah,
there are after all fairy creatures on this flat, stale, and
unprofitable earth," he thought, "enchanted princesses, mysterious
Melusinas." He smiled somewhat distrustfully--as a matter of habit. But
from this moment his frank, open, wooing attachment to the girl was
transformed