"The best and sweetest woman on earth, whom I love unspeakably."

"You know that is not what I mean. You could only say--a Miss Nobody,
from Nowhere."

"A Miss Hohlfelder, from Cincinnati, the only child of worthy German
parents, who fled from their own country in '49 to escape political
persecution--an ancestry that one surely need not be ashamed of."

"No; but the consciousness that it was not true would be always with
me, poisoning my mind, and darkening my life and yours."

"Your views of life are entirely too tragic, Clara," the young man
argued soothingly. "We are all worms of the dust, and if we go back far
enough, each of us has had millions of ancestors; peasants and serfs,
most of them; thieves, murderers, and vagabonds, many of them, no doubt;
and therefore the best of us have but little to boast of. Yet we are all
made after God's own image, and formed by his hand, for his ends; and
therefore not to be lightly despised, even the humblest of us, least of
all by ourselves. For the past we can claim no credit, for those who
made it died with it. Our destiny lies in the future."

"Yes," she sighed, "I know all that. But I am not like you. A woman is
not like a man; she cannot lose herself in theories and generalizations.
And there are tests that even all your philosophy could not endure.
Suppose you should marry me, and then some time, by the merest accident,
you should learn that my origin was the worst it could be--that I not
only had no name, but was not entitled to one."

"I cannot believe it," he said, "and from what we do know of your