evasively:

"Let that pass, dear Jungfrau. Perhaps love treats me as a mother deals
with a froward child, because I asked too much of her. My life has
become an endless battue. Much game of all kinds is thus driven out to
be shot, but the sportsman finds true pleasure only in tracking the
single heathcock, the solitary chamois. Yet, no," and in her eagerness
she flung her bandaged hand so high into the air that she groaned with
pain and was forced to keep silence. When able to speak once more, still
tortured by severe suffering, she exclaimed angrily: "No, I want neither
driving nor stalking. What do I care for the prey? I am a woman, too.
I would fain be the poor persecuted game, which the hunter pursues at the
risk of breaking his bones and neck. It must be delightful; one would
willingly bear the pain of a wound for its sake. I don't mean these
pitiful burns, but a deep and deadly one."

"You ought to have spared yourself these," said Els in a tone of
affectionate warning. "Consider what you are to your father, and how
your suffering pains him! To risk a precious human life for the sake of
a stupid brute--"

"They call it a sin, I know," Cordula burst forth. "And yet I would
commit the same tomorrow at the risk of again--Oh, you cautious city
people, you maidens with snow-white hands! What do you know of a girl
like me? You cannot even imagine what my child life was; and yet it is
told in a single word--motherless! I was never permitted to see her, to
hear her dear, warning voice. She paid with her own life for giving me
mine. My father? How kind he is! He meant to supply his dead wife's
place by anticipating my every wish. Had I desired to feast my eyes on
the castle in flames, it would, perhaps, now lie in ashes. So I became