When he secretly cursed her and called her a viper, he doubtless remembered how innocent, dear and joyous she had been, and then the roots of the destroyed affection put forth new shoots, and he saw before his mental vision ensnaring images, of which he felt ashamed as soon as they had vanished.
Lightning and hail had entered the "delightful garden" of Adam's life also, and he had been thrust forth from the little circle of the happy into the great army of the wretched.
Purifying powers dwell in undeserved suffering, but no one is made better by unmerited disgrace, least of all a man like Adam.

He had done what seemed to him his duty, without looking to the right or the left, but now the stainless man felt himself dishonored, and with morbid sensitiveness referred everything he saw and heard to his own disgrace, while the inhabitants of the little town made him feel that he had been ill-advised, when he ventured to make a fiddler's daughter a citizen.
When he went out, it seemed to him--and usually unjustly--as if people were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at him, appeared to grow from every eye.

At home he found nothing but desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the burning, gnawing wounds in his heart.

Ulrich must forget "the viper," and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed on which he would not fain have done so himself.
The smith did not stay long in the house on the market-place.

He wished to go to Freiburg or Ulm, any place where he had not been with her.