Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane Page A

experience as a pastor—and what complications and aberrations does one not meet with and learn to understand!—and I shall try to make these stories do their work in secret. Your sister is both imaginative and thoughtful and her imagination should lend vividness to what she hears while her thoughtful nature will force her to face the matter squarely and perhaps lead to a change of mind and then to a change of heart. That is all I can promise. It will be a slow process and the effort may well be quite disproportionate to the result. But at least I intend not to evade the issue because I realize that something must be done, even if it must be kept within very carefully defined limits.”
    â€œAll right, Schwarzkoppen. I have your word and that is sufficient. What is more, it’s a favourable moment to put our project into execution. Holk is expecting to be summoned to Copenhagen by the Princess in about four weeks’ time and he will be away until Christmas. In the intervening period, I shall frequently come over to see to the administration and accounts of the estate, as I always do whenever Holk is away in Copenhagen. I shall let you know each time I am driving over, to discover if you can come with me. I should also mention that, every time he is away, she is in a much more gentle, almost tender mood and she always recovers her earlier fondness for him, which at the moment is more a hope than a reality. In a word, while he’s away, her mind is like a field all ready to receive the good seed. It is merely a matter of trying to show her everything from another, as it were equally legitimate, viewpoint. If we succeed in doing that, then we shall have achieved our purpose. With the seriousness and conscientiousness with which she approaches everything, she will certainly be able to reach the right conclusion herself, once she has seen reason.”
    They had now reached the dyke which stretched out along the other side of the bay and on which the roadway continued to run for a short distance. The town lay below them and in the distance towered St. Catherine’s church in which the seminary was incorporated, while dominating the further end of the town stood the ancient castle that was Arne’s home. As the carriage drove down the slope into the town, Schwarzkoppen said: “What a strange sort of melodrama! Here we are, like a couple of conspirators, hatching plots by night and I suppose that I shall be playing the part that should have been taken by Petersen. And it is all the more strange because the countess really has a passionate admiration for him and the only thing she can find to blame in him is his rationalism. His rationalism! Nothing but a word and if you look at it closely, it is not really as bad as she seems to think, at any rate now. He has reached the limit of our allotted span and his eyes see more clearly than ours, perhaps in all things, and certainly in those pertaining to this world.”

6
    The lovely autumn days seemed reluctant to depart. Next morning, too, dawned bright and sunny and the count and countess took their breakfast in the open on the front veranda with Julie. Asta was practising the piano in the adjacent room while Axel and his tutor had gone shooting on the dunes, taking advantage of the Michaelmas holidays which the countess, as with holidays in general, was rather loath to recognize as a rule. In town and at school, holidays might be justified, but in the country amongst all the freedom of God’s creation, they were, she felt, to say the least, superfluous. The countess had long held this view on principle and smiled in a condescending manner when the count attempted to defend the opposite opinion; but although not having changed her views, she had, as an exception, not objected to this year’s Michaelmas holidays because she had still not abandoned her plan of sending the two children to boarding-school at the beginning of the winter term. So a few