But this time, too, her adjuration failed to awaken an echo.
"Good heavens," he said, "on close inspection what after all is this much-vaunted fight? Everybody walks over you, in winter you lie in a cold bed, and all year round you have nothing to eat. Of course, I'm going to go into it, of course I am, but it's hard, yes, indeed, it's hard! If I had a scholarship I should feel much better."
"So that's all the joy you have in facing the world?"
"My dear young lady," he rejoined, "a fellow who starts out with nothing but a satchel of darned wash and a hundred-mark bill--where's he to get much joy from?"
"He's the very one!" Lilly exclaimed, eager to cast a ray of her own confidence into his heart. "When somebody is like you, with the mark of greatness on his face, then the world lies at his feet."
She described a semicircle with her right hand, taking in the entire plain, its green bushes and silvery streams and the city with its wreath of swelling gardens lying embedded in the fields like a lark's nest in a meadow. Lilly felt as if she were showing him a small copy of his future realm.
He nodded several times in the dejected consciousness of knowing better than she what the world is like.
"Dear me, it's hard," he observed, "very, very hard."
She wanted whether or no to convince him of his own ability to conquer, and growing warmer and warmer continued with her peroration.
"If only I could express what I know and feel. If only I could give you some of my own assurance. Look at me, poor thing that I am. I have no father or mother, and no friends. If at least I could have stayed at school and graduated. But here I am, without a vocation, without money, without clothes for the winter--not even a decent pair of shoes." She stuck out the worn tips of her old boots, which until now she had kept carefully hidden. "I don't get as much to eat as I need either; and if I come home too late to-day, I shall be whipped. Yet I know that happiness is lying in wait for me. It is here already--in every breeze that blows my way, in every sunbeam that smiles at me--the whole world is happiness--the whole world is music--everything's a Song of Songs--everything's a Song of Songs!"
She turned from him with an impetuous movement, to keep him from seeing how she was quivering all over.