Part One, Chapters 1–6: The Experiment

Eduard — so we shall call a rich baron in the best years of his life — Eduard had spent the finest hour of an April afternoon in his nursery garden, grafting young trees with fresh shoots. He had just finished, and was looking at his work with pleasure, when the gardener came up and praised it. "Have you seen my wife?" asked Eduard. "Over in the new grounds," said the gardener. "The moss hut she has been building on the rock face across from the castle is finished today."

Eduard went across, by the paths his wife had laid out, and found Charlotte in the little hut, which looked out over the lake, the village and the castle. They sat together, and he told her what had long been on his mind: their old friend the Captain had lost his post, and was idle and unhappy; Eduard wanted to invite him to stay with them.

Charlotte hesitated. She had a foreboding, she said. They had waited so long for each other. As young people they had loved each other; their families had married them to others, older and richer; and when Eduard's wife and Charlotte's husband had died, they had married at last, and come here to live for themselves alone. Charlotte had even sent away her daughter Luciane, and her orphaned niece Ottilie, to a boarding school, so that they might be together. A third person, she said, changes every relation. Eduard argued that the Captain could help him with the estate, and she asked for a few days to think.

Then a rider was announced: Mittler, a strange man, once a clergyman, who had made it his whole business to settle the quarrels of married people and the disputes of neighbours, and who would not stay a moment in a house where there was nothing to reconcile. He galloped up, heard that there was no quarrel, lectured them on the uselessness of advice, and rode away without eating. And a letter came from the Captain: he had taken a dull post with some rich people, because he could find nothing better. Charlotte promised to look for something better for him, and they wrote to him together.

Charlotte admitted that the reports from the school about Ottilie troubled her: the headmistress praised Luciane, who shone at everything, and only made excuses for Ottilie. Eduard said they should bring Ottilie home as well. Charlotte thought it would hardly be wise to have a young girl in the house with a man of Eduard's age. But in the end they invited the Captain; and Eduard urged that Ottilie should come too.

The Captain came. All three of them shared a name-day, for Eduard's own first name was Otto, like the Captain's, and they celebrated together. They walked up to the heights above the valley, where Eduard showed his friend the poplars and plane trees he had planted as a boy. The Captain proposed to survey the whole estate and make a map of it with his compass; he criticised Charlotte's paths, and Eduard repeated it to her, and she was hurt, and then thought better of it. The Captain put Eduard's papers in order, separated business from pleasure, and set an old clerk to work; a medicine chest was bought, and arrangements made for helping the drowning.

In the evenings Eduard read aloud, and one evening he read from a book on chemistry; and the Captain explained what the chemists call elective affinities. Some substances, he said, when they meet, take hold of each other at once and change each other; others stay indifferent side by side. "And there are cases where two substances that are joined are parted by a third, which has a stronger attraction for one of them." Lime, for instance, has a great affinity for all acids; but if you pour sulphuric acid on chalk, the sulphuric acid takes the lime, and the weaker acid escapes as gas. That is why one speaks of choice, of elective affinity.

"Forgive me," said Charlotte, "but I'm sorry for the poor acid that has to wander off into the air."

"It is not so bad," said the Captain. "It can join with water, and become a refreshing mineral spring."

"That's easy for the gypsum to say," said Charlotte; "it's provided for. But the one that is driven out may have to go through many troubles before it finds a home."

"The most interesting cases," said the Captain, "are those where four elements, joined in two pairs, are brought together, abandon their old union, and form a new one, crosswise. A, which is closely joined to B, and C, which is joined to D: bring them together, and A throws itself at D, and C at B."

"Now," said Eduard, laughing, "you are A, Charlotte, and I am your B; for I depend on you and follow you as B follows A. The C is obviously the Captain, who for the moment draws me away from you a little. So it's only fair that if you are not to vanish into the air, you should have a D — and that is none other than the lovely little Ottilie, whose coming you can no longer resist."

"Very well," said Charlotte. "I have already decided to bring her here."

Two letters came from the school. The headmistress wrote that Luciane had again won all the prizes, and that Ottilie, though she had made great progress, had won none. The assistant teacher, a quiet, thoughtful young man, wrote more: Ottilie learned slowly but deeply; she could not show what she knew in an examination; Luciane had mocked her; and when Ottilie refused something, she pressed her palms together and drew them to her breast, bowing a little, with a look that no one could resist. She often had a headache on the left side. "And I," said Eduard, "have one on the right."

Ottilie came. She knelt before Charlotte and embraced her knees, and said she remembered a time when she had only reached up to them. She said little; she learned the ways of the house at once, kept a strict timetable, and was everywhere useful without being noticed. Charlotte had her dressed more elegantly; and the men could not take their eyes off her.

The two men kept better hours now, left the table less hastily, and shaped their talk so that Ottilie might take part in it; and Charlotte watched them, and could not tell which of them was drawn to her. Ottilie anticipated every need, quietly. Only one habit Charlotte asked her to give up: whenever a man dropped something, Ottilie sprang to pick it up. It might look, said Charlotte, as if she claimed a right to serve. Ottilie explained: she had once heard the story of King Charles the First, who, when his fortunes had fallen, dropped the top of his cane, and not one of the people round him bent to pick it up; since then she could not help it. But she promised to restrain herself.

The men walked through the village and saw its disorder: the brook that flooded, the crooked lane. Eduard was annoyed by a beggar and sent him away roughly, and was annoyed with himself afterwards; so the Captain arranged that a little money should be left at the inn and with an old couple at the end of the village, so that the poor might be given something as they went out, and not have to beg at the castle gate. And Eduard told Ottilie about Charlotte's earlier plans for the park, which Charlotte had not wanted spoken of; Charlotte was hurt, and avoided the subject; and so, in the evenings, the Captain showed them books of English parks, and what began as a joke became a plan: walks round the ponds, and a new summerhouse on the hill opposite the castle.