you mean all you say. I believe you do mean it, but that's just it: you live like a blind person; you don't see, you don't hear. That's the way you all of you live and exist, in a dream, with closed eyes and deaf ears. You none of you see, hear or understand anything. You know nothing. You are as unfeeling as stones. You can't help it, Constance, but it's a pity, for you are so nice. There might have been something to be made of you, if you had learnt to see and hear and feel. It's too late now, Constance. You are stupid now, like all the rest; but I'm sorry, for you are very nice. Your hand is soft, your voice is soft; and you did your best not to tread on my poor darlings . . . and not to drag them away on their chains, which are riveted so fast to my heart that they hurt me sometimes, here!"
He put his hand to his heart. A weariness came over her brain, as though she were exhausting herself in the effort to speak and to give understanding to an intelligence and a soul which remained very far away, miles away, and which her words could only reach through a dense cloud of darkness. And suddenly that sense of weariness and impotence became crueller and harder within her: it was as though she were talking to a stone, to a wall; she felt her own words beating back against her forehead like tennis-balls striking the wall.
"But, Ernst," she tried once more, "won't you
