“So he is, sweetheart; but I may be your dear friend, mayn’t I?  Would you like to have me for a friend?”

“Yes, yes!” she cried, and throwing her arms about my neck gave me a thousand kisses, which I returned with delight.

After we had talked and laughed together we sat down at table, and the heroine Therese gave me a delicate supper accompanied by exquisite wines.  “I have never given the margrave better fare,” said she, “at those nice little suppers we used to take together.”

Wishing to probe the disposition of her son, whom I had engaged to take away with me, I addressed several remarks to him, and soon discovered that he was of a false and deceitful nature, always on his guard, taking care of what he said, and consequently speaking only from his head and not from his heart.  Every word was delivered with a quiet politeness which, no doubt, was intended to please me.

I told him that this sort of thing was all very well on occasion; but that there were times when a man’s happiness depended on his freedom from constraint; then and only then was his amiability, if he had any, displayed.  His mother, thinking to praise him, told me that reserve was his chief characteristic, that she had trained him to keep his counsel at all times and places, and that she was thus used to his being reserved with her as with everyone else.

“All I can say is,” said I, “your system is an abominable one.  You may have strangled in their infancy all the finer qualities with which nature has endowed your son, and have fairly set him on the way to become a monster instead of an angel.  I don’t see how the most devoted father can possibly have any affection for a son who keeps all his emotions under lock and key.”

This outburst, which proceeded from the tenderness I would fain have felt for the boy, seemed to strike his mother dumb.

“Tell me, my dear, if you feel yourself capable of shewing me that confidence which a father has a right to expect of a good son, and if you can promise to be perfectly open and unreserved towards me?”

“I promise that I will die rather than tell you a falsehood.”

“That’s just like him,” said the mother.  “I have succeeded in inspiring him with the utmost horror of untruthfulness.”

“That’s all very well, my dear madam, but you might have pursued a still better course, and one which would have been still more conducive to his happiness.”

“What is that?”

“I will tell you.  It was necessary to make him detest a lie; you should have rather endeavoured to make him a lover of the truth by displaying it to him in all its native beauty.  This is the only way to make him lovable, and love is the sole bestower of happiness in this world.”

“But isn’t it the same thing not to lie and to tell the truth,” said the boy, with a smile which charmed his mother and displeased me.