Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/113

 that in reading this you will understand Mr. Stephensen better than you do me, and feel that in his place you would have reasoned in the same way.

"It was this recollection which so strongly overcame me after I had allowed you to kiss me. If you had known whom you had kissed, and that it was far from—oh, so far, from being my first kiss! And did not even this kiss prove that he had been right in considering me flighty? Perhaps you also had discovered it, and therefore took advantage of the knowledge. But no, I could not think that of you after our innocent intercourse. Such a kiss would not have been in accordance with it; perhaps it was a childish, thoughtless, or playful kiss, but certainly it was not one of love's Judas kisses. However, I understood neither you nor myself, and I was afraid for both of us. When I came home, I cried as if my heart would break, without really knowing why I was crying.

"But I must return to the old days. Mr. Stephensen spoke much to me about what I have told you, pointing out how wrong it all was, and correcting the objectionable views in which my mother had brought me up, and gradually he opened my eyes to many things to which I had previously been blind. He also discussed his art with me, and found that I had a good deal of natural taste for it (the painter Jagemann from the Weimar-period, a friend of Schiller, about whom perhaps you have read, was one of my ancestors, and my father had, as a young man, painted a little himself). I often went with Mr. Stephensen round our glorious gallery, where he was copying two pictures. During this time he grew more and more demonstrative, to which I strongly objected, and I only put up with it because I was so fond of him. Besides, I had the hope that he would marry me, but he always tried to talk me out of it. He had no