This Month's Installment
"I was prepared for this answer," he said very quietly, "and still I would like to know why you give me such a short negative reply."
She hesitated a moment. "Because for me it appears the main thing for a person and his action [is] that he knows where his purpose lay and what he feels himself capable of. Because only then can he work with success and satisfaction. I do not hold myself capable of this type of work that you wish from me."
"No," he answered with the same quiet, "it does not lie in that. But you don't want it to."
"Who tells you I don't?"
"Your whole behavior from the beginning on. Constantly you have lookt with disdain, sometimes almost animosity, on that in which I saw my purpose, what I began with a good, honest will. You have despised my spiritual striving, never read my books, not even the one about East Prussia. With some chapters that I wrote in a peaceful moment, I thought about you, about the impression that it would probably make on you - and you didn't read it once -"
"You thought about me?"
Suddenly there was an-other sound in her voice: something astonished, shocked almost, simultaneously something soft, warm, as - until now - he had never it heard from her.
"Yes, about you," he freely admitted. "It's something in you, in your appearance, in your essence, that for me embodies this country in its strength and significance."
She lookt at him; a marvelous glow was in her eyes - but only for a second, then
---54---
it again had that expression of quiet stiffness that to him [was] so often too strange and that he did not like in them.
"I changed my job," he continued, and his speech became more lively and faster, "and came here as a priest.
Grammatical Minutae
I translated "verkörpert" as "embodies" because I believe there's an etymological link here (also for the simple reason that that's what my dictionary suggested). I couldn't find anything to substantiate this, but I'm pretty sure that verkörpern comes - in part - from corpus, the Latin word for body. Obviously, body is an element in embody too. So this is something of an exact translation.There are some inconsistencies of number in the sentence "Sie sah ihn an, ein wunderbarer Glanz war in ihren Augen - aber nur für eine Sekunde, dann hatte es wieder jenen Ausdruck von leiser Starrheit, der ihm so oft zu eigen und den er in ihnen nicht mochte." There's "ihren Augen" ("her eyes"), which is plural, but later they're referred to with the singular "es" ("dann hatte es wieder") and then back to plural with "in ihnen."
