ight hundred thalers. She is
now more highly favored than any of us. With blessed satisfaction she
surveys now the past, and looks forward to the future in her son, and
what are her deriders? Puppets, dolls,--gossipping, music-making,
dancing, chattering, scandal-making dolls! They turn up their noses at
the man who has become so rich on the labor of slaves, and our
aristocratic fathers sell their children, and the children sell
themselves, for a high rank in society, for horses and carriages, for
finery and villas. The nobility, the poor nobility, is the inherited
curse from ancestral pride, from slavery to the ancestral idea! A
peasant woman, who gleans barefooted in the stubble-field, is happier
and freer than the lady who is driven through the streets in her
carriage, leaning back and cooling herself with her fan."

"I have one request," began Eric in a constrained voice; "will you
bestow upon me one hour of your life?"

"One hour?"

"Yes. Will you listen to me?"

"I am attentive." As she gazed at him, her eye-brows seemed to grow
larger and larger, the corners of her mouth to be drawn slowly down,
and her lips to open as if parched with a feverish heat; nothing was
wanting but the wings upon her head, and the snaky heads knotted under
her chin, to give the perfect Medusa-look.

Eric was for an instant petrified; then collecting himself, he
continued:--

"Two questions now rend my heart; one is, Has the violence of love
taken from me life, study, and the power of abstract thought? The other
is, Must a child of humanity, because destiny has once decided for him,
become a lifelong victim to this determination? And these two questions
resolve themselves into one, just as those snaky heads form one knot
under the chin of the Medusa."

"Go on!" urged Bella.

"Well, then, there was one hour when I would like to have said to the
beautiful wife sitting before me, 'I love thee!' and I would have
embraced and kissed her, but then,"--Eric pressed his hand upon his
heart, and gnashed his teeth,--"but that hour over, I should have put a
bullet through my brain!"

Bella let her eyes fall, and Eric went on: "One hour, and then my peace
was gone; I had nothing left. I could not sleep. I could not think.
This could not last. I lost myself, and what did I gain? I saw all that
this love devastated, and could it be love? No. Could I take it lightly
like others, it would be light. But why is this the only thing to be
made l