"Nonsense!" cried the doctor furiously. "He must now step to the foreground. We tolerated that anxious timidity in the scholar; but now when he has launched out under full sail as a poet, we forbid all such whims!"
Behrend shook his head. "Do not cherish too great hopes as to Walter's poetic future," he said. "I very much fear that with the sword, he will also lay aside the poets, then bury himself among his books, shut himself out from the outside world more vexatiously than ever, and in a year's time stand just where he did at the opening of the war."
"He will not do that!" cried the horrified doctor.
"He will; it would just suit his fancy. With all his genius, Walter remains an incorrigible dreamer; his energy is only an impulse of the moment. In moments of excitement and inspiration such natures do and dare all; as soon as the incitement is wanting, they sink back again into their dreaming. Life in its every-day dress is nothing to them, simply because they do not understand it."
"And a delightful thing it must be to dream away one's life," cried the doctor excitedly pacing up and down.
"Sensible men like you and me, Doctor Behrend, haven't the least idea of the nonsensical things that haunt such a learned, poetic head as Walter Fernow's."
"He needs a spur to effort," replied the doctor, gravely. "He needs an energetic, ardent force to remain daily and hourly at his side, and wrest him from that ideal life, to animate him for the conflict with the world and give him what he does not possess; ambition and self-confidence. If this were granted him, I believe there is no height he might not attain in the long future yet before him. But if an unhappy passion once comes to such a nature--"
Here Doctor Stephen suddenly wheeled around, and with supreme astonishment gazed into his colleague's face. "An unhappy passion!" he cried. "For Heaven's sake, our professor has not fallen in love!"
Behrend bit his lips in vexation. "Oh, not at all! It only occurred to me as a mere supposition."
Doctor Stephen was not so easily satisfied. "You have hinted at the truth," he said, "now out with it; who is the professor in love with? How long since it happened? Why is the love unhappy? I hope it is no French woman. Are the hindrances on the side of family, national hatred, or what?"
