were well enough known to
us. Such casual wounds, even from well-meaning, kindly-disposed people,
were nothing new to Charlotte. She so clearly, so thoroughly knew and
understood the world, that it gave her no particular pain if it did
happen that through somebody's thoughtlessness or imprudence she had her
attention forced into this or that unpleasant direction. But it was very
different with Ottilie. At her half-conscious age, at which she rather
felt than saw, and at which she was disposed, indeed was obliged, to
turn her eyes away from what she should not or would not see, Ottilie
was thrown by this melancholy conversation into the most pitiable state.
It rudely tore away the pleasant veil from before her eyes, and it
seemed to her as if everything which had been done all this time for
house and court, for park and garden, for all their wide environs, were
utterly in vain, because he to whom it all belonged could not enjoy it;
because he, like their present visitor, had been driven out to wander up
and down in the world--and, indeed, in the most perilous paths of it--by
those who were nearest and dearest to him. She was accustomed to listen
in silence, but on this occasion she sat on in the most painful
condition; which, indeed, was made rather worse than better by what the
stranger went on to say, as he continued with his peculiar, humorous
gravity:

"I think I am now on the right way. I look upon myself steadily as a
traveler, who renounces many things in order to enjoy more. I am
accustomed to change; it has become, indeed, a necessity to me; just as
in the opera, people are always looking out for new and newer
decorations, because there have already been so many. I know very well
what I am to expect from the best hotels, and what from the worst. It
may be as good or it may be as bad as it will, but I nowhere find
anything to which I am accustomed, and in the end it comes to much the
same thing whether we depend for our enjoyment entirely on the regular
order of custom, or entirely on the caprices of accident. I have never
had to vex myself now, because this thing is mislaid, or that thing is
lost; because the room in which I live is uninhabitable, and I must have
it repaired; because somebody has broken my favorite cup, and for a long
time nothing tastes well out of any other. All this I am happily raised
above. If the house catches fire about my ears, my people quietly pack
my things up, and we pass away out of