"I should do nothing, mademoiselle; I should be miserable."
The tone in which the words were uttered caused Grete to look up suddenly in her companion’s face. She saw nothing there but the inwardly-reflecting eyes, the beautiful, pale, dark complexion, and the placid sweetness of the unkissed lips.
"In England, Grete, I am an actress. They say that an actress must never reflect, that she lives for immediate gratification, that she educates impulses, and that she cannot pause, and regard her position, and criticise herself. If I cease to feel any pleasure in immediate gratifications, if I feel ill at ease and dissatisfied with myself, and fancy that the stage would no longer give me any pleasure—must I cease to be an actress?"
Grete Halm could not believe that her companion was an actress. Had she ever seen, even in Carlsruhe itself, an actress with such a noble air, with such a face, and such a manner?
"I am in earnest, Grete. I have been an actress all my life; I feel as if I were one no longer."
"What has changed you, mademoiselle, may I be permitted to ask?"
"I do not know myself, Grete. But I have turned an old woman since I came to the Black Forest; and I shall go back to England with a sort of fear, as if I had never been there before."
_Since she came to the Black Forest_. For a moment a suspicion crossed Grete’s mind that she must be miserable through loving some one; but so completely had she been imbued with the idea of her companion being some mysteriously beautiful and noble creature, who could not be moved by the meaner loves and thoughts of a girl like herself, that she at once dismissed the supposition. Perhaps, she thought, the shock of severely injuring her friend still affected her, and had induced a temporary despondency. Grete therefore resolved, in her direct way, to be as amusing as possible; and she never tired of directing her companion’s attention to the beautiful and wonderful things they saw on their way—the scarlet grasshoppers which rattled their wings among the warm grass, the brilliantly-coloured beetles, the picturesque crucifixes by the wayside, or the simultaneous splash of a lot of tiny fish among the reeds as some savage pike made a rush at them from the deeper water.
