human
Forgive me, child! he said mildly,
gpt
I was unjust. You have become what I educated you to be, what I would have you be, and I do not now regret having given you this direction. You will better endure the life-conflict than your weak, sensitive mother. Let this rest; it was something different you were to hear from me. Do you know that you have a brother?
human
As a child I sometimes heard a hint of this; but lately no one has ever spoken of him to me. Is he dead?
gpt
Perhaps he is dead, perhaps not. We have never been able to learn with certainty. I at last forbade all mention of his name, because his remembrance threatened to kill your mother; but the silence was of little avail; she never forgot him for a single hour.
human
You are not unacquainted with the recent history of your native country, my daughter; you are aware of the glowing enthusiasm which in the thirtieth year of the present century took possession of all Germany, and especially of its high schools. I was a student at that time, and, a youth of eighteen years, I was animated like so many of my comrades with visions of the freedom and greatness that might come to my fatherland under a new and more liberal order of things. We sought to carry out these revolutionary ideas, and for that crime the government repaid us with imprisonment, in many cases with sentence of death. I was doomed to die, but by especial favor, my sentence was commuted to thirty years' imprisonment. Seven of these years I endured; but as you have often enough heard the story, I will not repeat it now. Even these bitter years resulted in good to me; they ended for all time my youthful ideals and youthful illusions. When the amnesty at last came, under the iron pressure of the prison, in endless humiliations, in glowing hatred, had been ripened a man, who better than the twenty years' old dreamer knew how to bravely assume and patiently endure the struggle with life and misery.