wave of joy or sorrow could
break through it and send its spray up toward the heavens.

And now Beate Rauchfuss, as an old woman, sat at the end of an
afternoon in her garden on the Ettersberg. All was over that she had
once known--joys, longings, hopes, desires, and powers; and Herr Kosch
was gone too. She, that loved most deeply, had the most to bear--for
she bore him the rest of his life. His sufferings were her sufferings,
the movements of his life also the movements of hers. So she led
woman's burdensome double existence--the burdensome manifold existence
which is woman's.

With her children she shared the bliss of youth and the sorrows of
youth, felt with them their disappointments and their joys. With two of
her dear ones she had looked into the face of death; she had climbed
Herr Kosch's steep path with him, without his calling her to follow.
She had stolen out after him, learned to keep step with him as an
unnoticed companion of the way. And when he, weary of wandering, found
his faithful helper and comrade by his side, she had reached the goal
of her life.

Yes, women learn to think in a different way from men. She came to
understand her old friend's saying. As she gave birth to children, so
she gave birth to thoughts. Each was a hard-won conquest from the
heart of things, not found by chance, not learned, not strange and
separate--but born alive of herself and paid for with suffering.

When she sat, an old woman, in the rays of the setting sun, full of
peace, her soul was round as it had been in her first youth, with no
projections, no fissures, on which cares could hang themselves or into
which they could creep. Like a distant noise and bustle sounded the
world's business in the undisturbed peace. For the second time in her
life, her soul was like a sunlit ball of crystal; it had been so in her
youth, when no stain or shadow had yet fallen upon it from life, and
now, when all the stains and shadows were purged away from it.

Whether life was easy or hard, marriage happy or unhappy, work
successful or unsuccessful, it was all one--a matter of indifference.
Only one thing was not a matter of indifference: that the old woman sat
here now in the evening sunshine with a soul that was rounded and
transparent, floating in space like a clear shining sphere, dreaming
peacefully and asking nothing--done with the world.

CLARA VIEBIG

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