eu!

"BELLA."

The ladies exchanged glances of surprise; and Fraeulein Milch rejoiced
the Doctor by saying, for once in her life, an unkind word; for she
could not help expressing pleasure that Frau Bella had come to such an
end. The Doctor, on the other hand, said, in a tone of complaint,--

"I feel a want now that she is gone. I miss in her a sort of barometer
of thought and an interesting object of study. Strange! now that this
woman is gone we see, for the first time, how widely her influence was
extended,--more widely perhaps than was her due. But still the story
pleases me, as a proof that there still exist persons of courage and
strong will."

"You like eccentricity," suggested the Professorin.

"Oh, no! What seems eccentric to others appears to me the only natural
and consistent course, Bella could not have acted otherwise than she
has: this very step was a part of her heroism. Your son can tell you
that I suspected something of this sort before it happened. There is
much in common between Bella and Sonnenkamp. Both are quick and clear
in judgment where others are concerned; but, when self is touched, they
are tyrannical, malicious, and self-asserting. And, now that she is
fairly gone, I may say that she has fled a murderess: to be sure, she
did not kill Clodwig with poison or dagger, but she smote him to the
heart with killing words and thoughts. He confessed to me that it was
so, and now I may repeat it."

"I am confounded," said the Professorin. "With all her culture, how
were such things possible?"

"That was just it," broke in the Doctor delighted. "All this
intellectual life was nothing to Frau Bella: she found herself in it,
she knew not how. She had to destroy something, or what would she have
done with all this culture? Formerly there was hypocrisy only in
religion; now there is hypocrisy in education. But, no: Frau Bella was
no hypocrite, neither was she really ill-natured; she was simply
crude."

"Crude?"

"Yes. Thought of others educates at once the heart and the mind; Frau
Bella thought only and always of herself; of what she had to say and to
feel."

"Do you think," asked the Professorin with some hesitation, "that these
two persons can be happy together for a single hour?"

"Certainly not, according to our ideas of happiness. They have no real
affection for each other: pride and disappointment, and a desire to
shock the world, have indu