"Women, who respect themselves, are encompassed with so full a harmony of all their movements, words, looks!... I cannot depict her; but such ones are subjects to be depicted, who resemble the rose, which, down below, where one does not pluck them, has the longest and hardest thorns, but above, where one enjoys them, clothes itself only in a panoply of soft and bending ones.
"I know not whether it is with thee an old story, that daughters tell their mothers every truth and all secrets; to me it is something new, and only one best daughter, Beata, can do it.
"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure, and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended) without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of coarse natures, that cannot guess the hidden gratitude and the dumb joy, they are forced to assume hypocritically not the feeling but the expression of it. Beata's father demands for every present he makes, whose value he weighs even to an apothecary's grain, an exultant and exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice, what I have often before, that woman's body and soul are too tender and excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion, and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in the fifth act herself die with the hero.
"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true, the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile, and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister's lady, that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has Oefel's heart already _hooked_ or _eyed_ to her charms; but the devil trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee, whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly, art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it; for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could please (_if he pleased_), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a courtier, and buys with another's favor only his own. I will console thee with still more 'it is true's' before I bring on my 'buts.' Beata, it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I not admire him? the minster's lady looks as if she were asking _her_ every minute, 'why dost thou not envy me, when my vassal is like myself a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?'--for he keeps no one position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning, breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can now properly introduce the promised But.