The new residence was to afford me an opportunity to lead a lonely, quiet life with my mother and my books, which latter, however, were only to be used in moderation.
Shortly before our departure we had taken a longer drive with our new friends Fran Puricelli and her daughter Jenny to the Hirsau cloister.
The daughter specially attracted me.

She was pretty, well educated, and possessed so much independence and keenness of mind that this alone would have sufficed to render her remarkable.
Afterwards I often thought simultaneously of her and Nenny, yet they were totally unlike in character, having nothing in common save their steadfast faith and the power of looking with happy confidence beyond this life into death.
The devout Protestant had created a religion of her own, in which everything that she loved and which she found beautiful and sacred had a place.
Jenny's imagination was no less vivid, but she used it merely to behold in the form most congenial to her nature and sense of beauty what faith commanded her to accept.

For Jenny the Church had already devised and arranged what Nenny's poetic soul created.

The Protestant had succeeded in blending Father and Son into one in order to pray to love itself.
The Catholic, besides the Holy Trinity, had made the Virgin Mother the embodiment of the feeling dearest to her girlish heart and bestowed on her the form of the person whom she loved best on earth, and regarded as the personification of everything good and beautiful.

This was her older sister Fanny, who had married a few years before a cousin of the same name.
When she at last appeared I was surprised, for I had never met a woman who combined with such rare beauty and queenly dignity so much winning amiability.