Martin didn’t like to hear her talk of their happiness. It was a different thing to read it in her eyes and her color and to feel it in her kisses; he believed in it then, and no text could be more precious to interpret than that. But when he heard her talk about it he felt on his breast a weight of bitterness and oppression at the thought of how little he had really given her and how full of faults and deficiencies her poor happiness was. He knew that the short minutes she spent with him took on such vivid color just because she had to pay for them with long days and nights of fear, fear lest she should suddenly lose what she had dared so much to win, fear that all of a sudden everything might end some day, her golden happiness turn to withered leaves, and she herself be left more poor and lonely than ever before. This fear never really left her, he knew.
Once, it had not been so long ago, they had arranged to meet at his house. The time was approaching, he was awaiting her, there was a ring at the door, and he hurried to open it. But it was not she; it was one of his friends who had come to sit and talk a while. He could not say he was engaged or that he was expecting a visit, or the friend would have met her on the stairs and taken in the whole thing. He said instead that he was just going on an important errand, put on his hat and coat, and they went out together. They had not gone far beyond the gate before he saw her coming along the street. She cast a frightened and uncertain glance at him and he raised his hat to her as he passed, politely and a little distantly, as he had to do so as not to betray her. He turned off into a side street to get rid of his friend and after a couple of minutes came back circuitously to his gate. She was walking in front of it in the rain and mud. He pressed her hand softly and they went up. But when she was inside the door he saw she was trembling with sobs.
There was no need of explanations; she had already understood the situation, but his curt and chilly greeting as he passed, while he was talking with a strange man, had been enough to rouse the secret fear in her blood; she had to give it vent, she had to weep, and she wept long and silently in his arms.
Ah! their poor happiness; it had given them much but it could not bear the bright and arid illumination of words; it could not endure being spoken of. All his tenderness could not give her the calm which accompanies a life that can be shown to the multitude and approved by them, nor could it in solitude prevent her from sometimes feeling ashamed and conscience-stricken. For because life had shown her two different aspects, between which she could not see any connection, she had not one conscience but two. One told her she had acted rightly and that the time would come some day when no one would be able to understand any more why people had formerly concealed the love between man and woman in shame and filth and called it sin. But the other conscience said nothing about the future; it rose from the depths of the past, speaking with the accents of her dead mother and with voices from her home in the woods and from her childhood, when she knew nothing of the world or of herself, when everything was simple and one only needed to be good to have things go nicely.
On evenings when he had just left and she sat alone in her rented room with strange stupid furniture, amid which the bureau with the Empire mirror and the green stone top was the only thing that was hers and the only object to remind her of her childhood home, the old conscience would rise up and whisper many vulgar things into her ear. It whispered that both the women who married men repugnant to them so as to be provided for and the poor girls who sold their bodies from necessity were better than she was, for they had at least a reason for their conduct but she had none. It did not help that she thought of her great love and defended her course with that; the old conscience was prepared for such an argument and whispered in reply that it was not he who had kindled the fire in her blood; her own desire had blown upon the flame; the evil was in herself, and she was an abandoned creature who ought to be whipped with rods in the town hall, as people used to treat women of loose morals. Still worse things this conscience hit upon, whispering that he whom she loved would soon tire of her, nay, that he had already tired and despised her in his heart because she was always so willing to sin and had never denied him anything.
He knew all this, for she always let him share her troubles. He in turn always felt the same wonder and surprise at this
