I had never yet yearned for Witold as at that moment, though I knew perfectly well that no one had done me the wrong which he had done.
“What about Helen?” I asked, with friendly interest.
“There again! I have been disappointed in her.”
“What, she! Unfaithful to you? Can that be?”
“Ah, no! I, rather than she, have been at fault in that respect.”
“Well then?”
“Well, what shall I say? I have broken with her.”
Forsaken! She too had then come to swell the list, after Martha, Gina, and myself!
“That’s horrible. She was so very much in love with you.”
“Whereas I, alas! have a preference for women who care for nothing very much.”
“Yet I know you have been moody of late.”
“And you are right: yes, I have.”
“Well, what was it that troubled your Olympian calm? The parting scene—tears—upbraiding?”
“Pas le moins du monte. She went away without uttering a word.”
“Then what was it?”
“That I have simply lost my belief in the last dogma left to me from childhood. Everybody complains that women are too devoid of heart and brains and soul; and I now find that it is in vain I have sought for a woman bereft of those superfluous appendages.”
“But Helen, as I understood, answered your ideal of a woman to perfection?”
“I fondly thought she did. Oh, you cannot imagine what I would give to meet a woman really soulless, primitive: you know—a creature absolutely and bewilderingly unenlightened.”
“Really, I quite dislike you today, Stephen. You are positively in bad form!”
“Please forgive me.”
“What special mark of her culture has Helen given you?”
“Culture? That would have been by far too bad. Besides, it was something perhaps even worse: a mark of character, firm conviction.”
“Up to now,” he continued, “I had been quite satisfied with the girl; so, a few days ago, I proposed that she should give up her employment and come to live with me. Would you believe it? I met with a point-blank refusal. You fancy, perhaps, it was marriage she wanted, or something of that kind; and, word of honour! If she had, I would have taken her willingly. … Not at all. She told me sententiously that ‘although she recognized free love, she never would be a kept woman!’ What do you think of that, eh? Ha, ha! It’s something astounding, isn’t it?”
But I could not laugh. I sat silent, thinking of many things, far more pained than amused.
Stephen continued: “A girl with such splendidly expressionless eyes of a bright azure, like a piece of water! No shadow of any yearning for the Beyond, no shadow of anything like intellect or brightness of thought! … By day they reflected the sun, her lamp in the evening, and my own eyes at night. They had the beautiful dead gleam of pearls. She might have been less pretty: with such eyes, she was pretty enough for me. And then, that slow, sleepy, brainless voluptuousness in her glance! And her white flashing teeth, too! I tell you, there is not a single spot or flaw in any one of them; her molars are like the molars of a ruminant, large and flat. She did, it is true, write me letters without necessity; but, through my influence and under my direction, she had come even to forget her alphabet. She truly gave me the impression (false as I know now) that she never thought at all.
“And that girl ‘recognizes free love’! Such a surprise may well make one throw all the beliefs of one’s life on the dustheap!”
All this talk of his seemed to me decidedly shallow and foolish. Why on earth was he trying, by means of that farfetched theory of his, to justify the fact that the woman simply bored him?
He has now made up his mind to seek for his future Dulcineas amongst kitchen-maids.
“Dressmakers have decidedly too much culture for my taste,” he said.
“I sincerely hope you may be successful,” was my parting wish.
Witold, contrary to my expectations, has not yet called again. There is something going on that is beyond me, incomprehensible.
I am assailed by innumerable thoughts which make me turn pale with fear.
He, too, is possibly “seeking oblivion,” as I was; but he is scarce likely to stop in time, like me. Moreover, his vengeance will not, like mine, be a more horrible pain than the injury itself.
He has a supremely great advantage over me, and the conditions of the struggle are the most unequal possible.
Will he delay coming for long? Is it conceivable that he has given me up forever?
I was in tears all this evening.
Idalia felt it her duty to try and comfort me. A kind, lovable girl she is. And she knows how to deal skilfully with “semitones” of every description. Her eyes are gentle, her face a little faded and careworn; there is something maternal about her.
“We take everything so very seriously, so very much au tragique,” she says. “And that, you see, puts us more in their power. We should analyse things less, and learn rather to glide over them. Analysis is a two-edged weapon: it easily turns and wounds you. Do endeavour to pass along with a cursory look about you, even with half-closed eyes; things will seem different at once. Don’t cry any more: and if he should come, the servant is to let him in, is she not?”
“On no account; on no account;” I cried, in a fury.
“But why?” she murmured, gently stroking my hair. “Why? To let him in—that does not bind you in any way: you are free to act as you like. And why not hear what he has to say?”
“Because I have heard him already.”
“And you would not believe him? You were not right in that. It is so easy to believe! … And whether the thing is true or not, what does it matter to you? What is true in some part of time may be
