a series of aesthetic lectures was not considered out of place. For the delivery of these lectures the lot fell on Vojtech.
Vojtech accepted the responsibility and began to prepare himself for his first appearance in public with energy and earnestness. He collected as in a bouquet all his varied knowledge.
To glorify the champions of spirituality had been even in his boyish days his favourite intellectual exercise and in all his teaching he gave it the pre-eminence.
To familiarize himself with it he had renounced all the advantages of an official position. Rather than be led away from his ideal he had preferred poverty, and because he was faithful to that ideal, he met with contempt in all the houses where he had been a teacher. A career all at once opened before him and his spirit yearned for it with enthusiastic vehemence. All that had been censured in him as unpractical in a domestic teach now found fresh fuel and it seemed to him that at least in part were personified in him the noble aspirations of a whole nation. What seemed ridiculous to children, would not be so before an audience of men and women.
Let him present to the eye of the public the hidden warfare that surged around a great idea! Let him stand forth as the champion of the reality of spirit to which he was attached by his whole existence!
Good taste and feeling are the index of a man, and Vojtech had to be the guardian of that taste and feeling.
Vojtech felt happy in this new character. The effect which his lecture produced was great.
He succeeded completely in animating the public with his own ideas and Vojtech’s name was all at once in every one’s mouth.
“I shall not be a valueless factor in society”, he repeated to himself in full consciousness of the truth of what he said. He had found his own soul so to speak and began the task of training himself to be of value. He still felt the need of communicating his ideas to the world at large-an irrisistible attraction was here.
One day Vojtech came to the Horskas’s and found Lidunka absorbed in thought. On the road he had encountered one of Lidunka’s relations and conjectured the reason why Lidunka was lost in thought. Her relations did not approve of Vojtech because he did not pay court to them and as generally happens the young lady’s relations took note of the aspirant to her hand. The Liduncine relationship made it the business of its life to ferret out Vojtech’s antecedents and understood them so far as reason
