have much in
us that is foreign--or dead. I'm not talking so much of myself--I'm a
simple old fellow. But for all that, you know, old Sperber isn't a
fool. Do you think he doesn't understand you? Ah ...

"When a man is in love with you, he's everything but your friend. He
can only be your friend when the stage of being in love has passed;
and even then he may not be your friend. That's a thing you've got
to deserve! That is life's highest gift, and it doesn't fall into
everybody's lap. Yes--perhaps you can't even deserve it; it's got to
come to you like the big prize in the lottery.

"And so we come to it: we are too simple for you--you want to go up
higher. You don't want to grow as we have grown, I fancy, to develop
quietly like my old woman. You want to spring up suddenly to the
heights. The air that comes up from Weimar has poisoned you--that fine
spiritual air. But you see there's nothing for you in that. Wait, wait,
wait! What the good God has chosen that we should know here below, we
shall know when the time comes; mother Nature looks out for that.
There's no need of a forcing-house for such plants.

"Look--there's still time. Tomorrow morning early I'll go to your
engraver and say to him: 'My dear fellow, you probably know by this
time what girls are ... An old man has been talking to her, and she has
changed her mind.' It would be ruination for both of you."

"Let me go my way, Uncle Sperber," she said--"let me go my way. I
can't live without him!"

"Tubby, that's exactly the way your mother talked. I don't take any
stock in a love like that--none of God's creatures is worth it. Not
one. My old woman and I began gently and quietly, and we've always gone
along the same way. It seems to me one doesn't want a harbor
where the waves run so high that the ship can't rest in it. Listen,
my girl ... were you intending to copy him in all his nonsense? I don't
know ... I should be telling a lie if I said it would please me
specially!"

"No," she said, "I believe you, Uncle Sperber; I suppose it couldn't
please you. Every one speaks only to his own kind, and the rest don't
understand him. My man is understood here by nobody--if he spoke with
the tongue of an angel, it would be just the same. But I ...! My heart
went out to him instantly: from the very first moment I felt that I
knew him like an old friend."

"Tubby," said the old man with a sigh, "I don't have to tell you what
you'd be exposed to with him. God ga