Olga’s Plans

messenger he couldn’t allow himself to do that⁠—seemed at the first glance obsolete and not of much importance, yet took on the utmost importance in as much as they referred you to the Superintendent. Now in these circumstances how were we to conduct ourselves towards you? If we emphasised the letters’ importance, we laid ourselves under suspicion by overestimating what was obviously unimportant, and in pluming ourselves as the vehicle of these messages we should be suspected of seeking our own ends, not yours; more, in doing that we might depreciate the value of the letter itself in your eyes and so disappoint you sore against our will. But if we didn’t lay much stress on the letters we should lay ourselves equally under suspicion, for why in that case should we have taken the trouble of delivering such an unimportant letter, why should our actions and our words be in such clear contradiction, why should we in this way disappoint not only you, the addressee, but also the sender of the letter, who certainly hadn’t handed the letter to us so that we should belittle it to the addressee by our explanations? And to hold the mean, without exaggeration on either side, in other words to estimate the just value of those letters, is impossible, they themselves change in value perpetually, the reflections they give rise to are endless, and chance determines where one stops reflecting, and so even our estimate of them is a