answering, but the cheerfulness of his face showed me that he concealed nothing dangerous.”  If you must know, then,” replied he at last, “when she was asked about you, and her intercourse with you, she said quite frankly, ’I cannot deny that I have seen him often and with pleasure; but I have always treated him as a child, and my affection for him was truly that of a sister.  In many cases I have given him good advice; and, instead of instigating him to any equivocal action, I have hindered him from taking part in wanton tricks, which might have brought him into trouble.’”

My friend still went on making Gretchen speak like a governess; but I had already for some time ceased to listen to him, for I was terribly affronted that she had set me down in the reports as a child, and believed myself at once cured of all passion for her.  I even hastily assured my friend that all was now over.  I also spoke no more of her, named her no more:  but I could not leave off the bad habit of thinking about her, and of recalling her form, her air, her demeanor; though now, in fact, all appeared to me in quite another light.  I felt it intolerable that a girl, at the most only a couple of years older than me, should regard me as a child; while I conceived I passed with her for a very sensible and clever youth.  Her cold and repelling manner, which had before so charmed me, now seemed to me quite repugnant:  the familiarities which she had allowed herself to take with me, but had not permitted me to return, were altogether odious.  Yet all would have been well enough, if by signing that poetical love-letter, in which she had confessed a formal attachment to me, she had not given me a right to regard her as a sly and selfish coquette.  Her masquerading it at the milliner’s, too, no longer seemed to me so innocent; and I turned these annoying reflections over and over within myself until I had entirely stripped her of all her amiable qualities.  My judgment was convinced, and I thought I must cast her away; but her image!—­her image gave me the lie as often as it again hovered before me, which indeed happened often enough.

Nevertheless, this arrow with its barbed hooks was torn out of my heart; and the question then was, how the inward sanative power of youth could be brought to one’s aid?  I really put on the man; and the first thing instantly laid aside was the weeping and raving, which I now regarded as childish in the highest degree.  A great stride for the better!  For I had often, half the night through, given myself up to this grief with the greatest violence; so that at last, from my tears and sobbing, I came to such a point that I could scarcely swallow any longer; eating and drinking became painful to me; and my chest, which was so nearly concerned, seemed to suffer.  The vexation I had constantly felt since the discovery made me banish every weakness.  It seemed to me something frightful that I had sacrificed sleep, repose, and health for the sake of a girl who was pleased to consider me a babe, and to imagine herself, with respect to me, something very much like a nurse.