The moral of this story, as Manske, wise after the event, pointed out when relating those parts of it that he knew on winter evenings to a dear friend, plainly is that all females—alle Weiber—are best married. "Their aspirations," he said, "may be high enough to do credit to the noblest male spirit; indeed, our gracious lady's aspirations were nobility itself. But the flesh of females is very weak. It cannot stand alone. It cannot realise the aspirations formed by its own spirit. It requires constant guidance. It is an excellent material, but it is only material in the raw."

"What?" cried his wife.

"Peace, woman. I say it is only material in the raw. And it is never of any practical use till the hand of the master has moulded it into shape."

"Sehr richtig," agreed the friend; with the more heartiness that he was conscious of a wife at home who had successfully withstood moulding during a married life of twenty years.

"That," said Manske, "is the most obvious moral. But there is yet another."

"The story is full of them," said the friend, who had had them all pointed out to him, different ones each time, during those evenings of howling tempests and indoor peace—the perfect peace of pipes, hot stoves, and Glühwein.

"The other," said Manske, "is, that it is very sinful for little girls to write love-poetry in the name of their aunts."

"To write love-poetry is at no time the function of little girls," said the friend.

"Such conduct cannot be too strongly censured," said Manske. "But to do it in the name of someone else is not only not mädchenhaft, it is sinful."

"These English little girls appear to know no shame," said his wife.

"Truly they might learn much from our own female youth," said the friend.

Letty's poems had undoubtedly been the indirect cause of the fire, of Axel's arrest, and of his marriage with Anna. But if they had brought about Anna's happiness, a happiness more complete and perfect than any of which she had dreamed, they had also brought about Klutz's ruin. For Klutz, shattered in nerves, weak of will, overcome by the state of his conscience and the possible terrors of the next world, with the blood of three generations of pastors in his veins, every drop of which cried out to him day and night to save his soul at least, whatever became of his body, Klutz had confessed. He was only twenty, he knew himself to be really harmless, he had never had any intentions worse than foolish, and here he was, ruined. The act had been an act of temporary madness; and influenced by Dellwig, he had saved his skin afterwards as best he could. Now there was the price to pay, the heavy price, so tremendous when compared to the smallness of the follies that had led him on step by step. His bad genius, Dellwig, went free; and later on lived sufficiently far away from Kleinwalde to be greatly respected to the end of his days. Manske's eyes filled with tears when he came to the action of Providence in this matter—the mysteriousness of it, the utter inscrutableness of it, letting the morally responsible go unpunished, and allowing the poor young vicar, handicapped from his very entrance into the world by his weakness of character, to be overtaken on the threshold of life by so terrific a fate. "Truly the ways of Providence are past finding out," said Manske, sorrowfully shaking his head.

"I never did believe in Klutz," said his wife, thinking of her apple jelly.

"Woman, kick not him who is down," said her husband, turning on her with reproachful sternness.

"Kick!" echoed his wife, tossing her head at this rebuke, administered in the presence of the friend; "I am not, I hope, so unwomanly as to kick."

"It is a figure of speech," mildly explained the friend.

"I like it not," said Frau Manske gloomily.

"Peace," said her husband.