How strange that the same memory did not obtrude itself on him.
Oh, Michel Solheid had laid bleeding on the Venn--blood had dripped on
the ground to-day as on that day. The little boy had not complained,
just as little as his--she fought against using the word even in her
thoughts--as his father, as Michel Solheid had complained. And still
the red blood had gushed out as though it were a spring. How much more
natural it would have been for him to have cried. Did Wolf feel
differently from other children?

Kate went through the list of her acquaintances; there was not a
single child that would not have cried if he had got such a wound, and
he would not have been considered a coward on that account. There was
no doubt about it, Woelfchen was less sensitive. Not only more
insensible to bodily pain, no--and she thought she had noticed it
several times--also more insensible to emotion. Even in the case of
joy. Did not other children show their happiness by clapping their
hands and shouting? Did not they dance round the thing they
wanted--the toy, the doll, the cake--with shouts of delight? He only
held out his hand for it in silence.

He took it because he had been told to do so, without all the
childish chatter, without the rapturous delight that makes it so
attractive and satisfactory to give children gifts.

"As a peasant," her husband used to say. That cut her to the quick
every time he said it. Was Woelfchen really made of such different
material? No, Paul must not say "peasant." Woelfchen was not stupid,
only perhaps a little slow in thinking, and he was shrewd enough. He
had not been born in a large town, that was it; where they lived now
was just like the country.

"You peasant!" The next time his father said it--it was said in
praise and not to blame him, because he was pleased the boy kept his
little garden so well--Kate flew into a passion. Why? Her husband did
not understand the reason for it. Why should he not be pleased? Had not
the boy put a splendid fence round his garden? He had made a palisade
of hazel-sticks into which he had woven flexible willow-twigs, and then
he had covered the whole with pine branches to make it close. And he
had put beans and peas in his garden, which he had begged the cook to
give him; and now he meant to plant potatoes there as well. Had anybody
told him how to do it? No, nobody. The first-rate cook and the
housemaid were both from a town, what did they know about sowing peas