n the
world to forget herself, to let herself dissolve in music and motion.
She distinguished her suitors only by their ability as dancers; as to
their intellectual capacity, which indeed was not specially noticeable
in any of them, she easily confused them. She herself was without any
instinct of the chase or desire for conquest, simply contented and
happy in herself.

So the time passed on. The impatience of the aspirants might well have
seemed to her like a flood rising to her very lips, threatening and
terrifying her, or like a row of insistent creditors, with herself
sitting in her little room in peace and letting them knock and call as
loud as they would. She did not realize the impatience of the hunters;
they seemed all so foreign, so far off to her.

To take one of these strangers into her house, to have him always
about, to be obliged to see him every day, seemed a thing so
distasteful and impossible that the thought did not even trouble her.
But she dreamed of wonders--of one whom she would long to love. She
felt something strong, great and good in herself, and realized at the
same time her ignorance and her limitations. Her longing for freedom
was also a longing for breadth, a desire to escape from all that was
narrow, a will to grow.

Hitherto no one had offered her the bread of life; and she was hungry.
Her beauty had in it something sleeping, something strong, that
yearned to be active in this world and beyond; but no one offered to
nourish this wonderful thing. What they offered her was no royal,
soul-strengthening food; it was but ordinary, every-day diet, on which
she would pine away and starve.

Yes ... she dreamed long, amidst all her suitors, of an awakening
compared with which the life which these others called into being in
her was but a deep, dull sleep.

The Raven-mother took delight in observing that the fortress she was
set to guard showed no signs of surrendering; for so the comfortable
existence up at the Rauchfuss farm might prolong itself a while longer.

On Sunday afternoons and evenings they had the most of their visitors.
Then came the suitors, the Kirsten girls with their friends, the pretty
young widow, and often the good Kummerfelden, who took great delight in
listening to the irrational chatter of the amorous youths.

"These men-creatures are enough to drive one mad when they're in love,"
she said once to the Raven-mother. "The bird sings his prettiest songs
to his mate and