When Pilgrim came now, Annele said to him, graciously:--"Pray light your pipe, I rather like the smell; I seem at home when people are smoking around me."
"You are certainly not at home here," thought Pilgrim, but he took care not to say so. Though Annele attacked Pilgrim on every side, she could not obtain his co-operation, and Lenz was obstinate and impervious to all flattery, and proof even against bursts of rage, in a way she never could have expected from him.
"You first wished to make me a pedlar, to sell watches," said he; "and then a manufacturer, and now landlord of the Lion; if I am to become so entirely different from my former self, what did you see in me to induce you to marry me?"
Annele evaded any reply, but she said, bitterly:--"You are as soft as butter to the whole world, but to me as hard as a pebble."
Lenz thought he was an experienced man, but Annele wished to make him one. She neither said to him, nor admitted to herself, that she thought herself the best fitted of the two to gain a livelihood, but she wept and complained that she was of no use, and pitied herself on that account. She said she only wished to act for the best; and what is it she wishes? to work, to increase their means, but Lenz will not hear of it.
Lenz told her that the garden was formerly very productive, she had better cultivate it; but she had no taste for gardening:--"Every plant grows just where it is placed, in peace and quiet, and requires no pressing or driving forwards. Make haste! it is far too slow an affair to watch what is growing and blossoming in time: three visits to the kitchen, and three to the cellar, and I have gained more profit than I would get from such a garden the whole summer; and an old woman, to whom we pay a trifle, is quite good enough to work in the garden."
Now there was no end to the worry, and complaints, and lamentations, that they must live so sparingly at home, Lenz was often in despair, and sometimes so incensed, that he seemed to have become quite another man. Then he was seized with a fit of repentance, and he took up a different position, and said he was ashamed of all this discord before his workmen and apprentices, and if Annele allowed him no peace, he was resolved to send them away.