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the same. It was only when they had come out into the hall among the modern things that he suddenly plucked up his courage again amidst these new, more reckless and more highly coloured surroundings. With a solemnity that was more austere than ever⁠—perhaps because it required more effort⁠—Hedvig halted before an animal painting, signed by a not unknown French artist. The picture represented two tigers, as innocently striped as if they had been painted by a child of five. They were playing in a jungle which seemed to consist of a ragged bouquet of dried grass.

Then Levy could keep silent no longer: “I know a little story about that master,” he exclaimed eagerly. “Two Parisian Jewish dealers had a good lunch together and then went down to the Salon des Indépendants. And there one of the Jews made a bet with the other that inside a year he would take up and make famous any one of the exhibitors. And the other Jew walked about a long time searching till he found the most hopeless and impossible painter in the whole gigantic exhibition. He chose this painter. But the other was not frightened. He quickly created for the tiger painter a new school of art, which was dubbed ‘naivism’ and in one year he became, as a matter of fact, world-famous. There you see the power of advertisement and of the Jewish genius.”

Of course Hedvig in her inmost heart understood Levy much better than the picture. But we are all most sensitive about our lies. And she also grew angry because she felt again that she was losing her supremacy and began to feel unsafe. That’s why she regarded his blasphemous story as an insult to Percy’s memory.

“An artist may be great even though he has been run by an unscrupulous Jew,” she mumbled. “This picture was, as a matter of fact, bought before the Jews made it expensive. And it was the general opinion amongst my husband’s friends that it was a real find.”

Hedvig began an eager defence of the striped tigers and the ragged dried grass. She used expressions that she had heard on Percy’s lips during the art discussions down in Montparnasse and from the time when he tried in vain to convince her of the new ideals. She stole his phrases, his catchwords, his characteristic abbreviations, his little jokes and even his trick of bending his head on one side and looking through half-closed eyes.

So the game of “Chinese shades” was followed by a plundering of the dead. All that she could lay hands on was now used as a weapon against the insistent Levy. Truly, human beings play strange games with each other.

Levy suddenly looked very tired. There was something pathetic about his raised shoulders. He had one of his fits of inevitable truth-telling. But his quick, harsh voice was unsteady:

“Why do you lie to me, Hedvig?” he mumbled. “You were an enemy to all art whilst your husband was alive. Yes, I know it. And you are still to this day indifferent to all this. And all the same you let loose these striped tigers on me. Why can you never be sincere, Hedvig? Why are you so afraid that you must always lie?”

Hedvig froze up and was silent. Every nerve in her was chilled. Never had anyone dared to come so near to her. It seemed as if this man had dared to see more of her than she herself had seen. She kept absolutely motionless like an animal shamming death to escape a danger. And still⁠—did she not feel far, far within a sort of wild relief, something of the same kind as she had felt once when hearing Peter’s cynicisms, though deeper, finer.⁠ ⁠…

Levy stretched out his hand:

“Good night! I am a little tired. I must go now. I will look after your mortgage. Goodbye⁠—till next time!”

And then he was gone.

Hedvig went to bed, though it was still daylight. She was accustomed to go to bed immediately after his visits. She longed to lie motionless on her back and think.

Hedvig undressed slowly and carefully. She still felt her nerves trembling. For a moment she stood naked before the big mirror built into the wall. Her body was wonderfully well preserved. In its pale, even whiteness, its slim roundness, it seemed to her wonderfully young, immensely younger than she herself. And still it made her shudder. It might betray her to love, at any moment it might betray her to love.⁠ ⁠… And some day it would relentlessly deliver her to death. Yes, Hedvig belonged to those in whom nakedness always awakens thoughts of death. If she had lived some hundred years earlier her fear would have driven her to self-torture. Then she would have scourged and martyred her body in order to blunt the point of death.

She quickly drew the blinds and crept beneath the bedcover. She slept in Percy’s old bedroom, that solemn debauch in the architecture of the ’nineties which had once aroused her frightened amusement when she came there as a nurse. The bed still resembled a gigantic catafalque, in the vault of the alcove, the zodiacal signs gleamed and in the twilight on the opposite wall the blood dripped from Saint Sebastian’s naked sides.⁠ ⁠…

Hedvig knew that she had a long sleepless night in front of her. With her eyes half-closed and her hands stretched by her sides, she went slowly and carefully through all that had passed between her and Levy. In the silence she weighed his gestures, his looks, his tones and his actions. There was something in them that she revelled in, slowly sipping, drop by drop, like a frightened drinker. It was a lonely, selfish joy, separated from the world by walls of darkness and silence.

But by and by she grew more restless, sighed, and turned over beneath the bedclothes. She felt that she was approaching a thought that always recurred with terrible regularity during her nightly meditations. Levy was her lawyer? Why