“Why are you behaving in this way?” she said kindly.  “You know, I’m not angry with you for what you said last night.  You can’t help it if you love me.  I’m flattered.  But although I’m not exactly engaged to Hermann I can never love anyone else, and I look upon myself as his bride.”

Philip blushed again, but he put on quite the expression of a rejected lover.

“I hope you’ll be very happy,” he said.

XXIV

Professor Erlin gave Philip a lesson every day.  He made out a list of books which Philip was to read till he was ready for the final achievement of Faust, and meanwhile, ingeniously enough, started him on a German translation of one of the plays by Shakespeare which Philip had studied at school.  It was the period in Germany of Goethe’s highest fame.  Notwithstanding his rather condescending attitude towards patriotism he had been adopted as the national poet, and seemed since the war of seventy to be one of the most significant glories of national unity.  The enthusiastic seemed in the wildness of the Walpurgisnacht to hear the rattle of artillery at Gravelotte.  But one mark of a writer’s greatness is that different minds can find in him different inspirations; and Professor Erlin, who hated the Prussians, gave his enthusiastic admiration to Goethe because his works, Olympian and sedate, offered the only refuge for a sane mind against the onslaughts of the present generation.  There was a dramatist whose name of late had been much heard at Heidelberg, and the winter before one of his plays had been given at the theatre amid the cheers of adherents and the hisses of decent people.  Philip heard discussions about it at the Frau Professor’s long table, and at these Professor Erlin lost his wonted calm:  he beat the table with his fist, and drowned all opposition with the roar of his fine deep voice.  It was nonsense and obscene nonsense.  He forced himself to sit the play out, but he did not know whether he was more bored or nauseated.  If that was what the theatre was coming to, then it was high time the police stepped in and closed the playhouses.  He was no prude and could laugh as well as anyone at the witty immorality of a farce at the Palais Royal, but here was nothing but filth.  With an emphatic gesture he held his nose and whistled through his teeth.  It was the ruin of the family, the uprooting of morals, the destruction of Germany.

“Aber, Adolf,” said the Frau Professor from the other end of the table.  “Calm yourself.”

He shook his fist at her.  He was the mildest of creatures and ventured upon no action of his life without consulting her.

“No, Helene, I tell you this,” he shouted.  “I would sooner my daughters were lying dead at my feet than see them listening to the garbage of that shameless fellow.”

The play was The Doll’s House and the author was Henrik Ibsen.

Professor Erlin classed him with Richard Wagner, but of him he spoke not with anger but with good-humoured laughter.  He was a charlatan but a successful charlatan, and in that was always something for the comic spirit to rejoice in.