ELSIE LINDTNER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE DANGEROUS AGE

Letters and Fragments from
a Woman’s Diary

ELSIE LINDTNER

A Sequel to “The Dangerous Age”

BY
KARIN MICHAËLIS
STANGELAND

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
BY
BEATRICE MARSHALL

NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXII

PREFACE

Readers and admirers of “The Dangerous Age”—and their name is legion—will find themselves perfectly at home in the following story. To them, Elsie Lindtner’s rambling aphorisms, her Bashkirtseffian revelations of soul, the remarkably frank letters which she delights to write to her friends, among whom she numbers her divorced husband; above all, her rather preposterous obsession with regard to the dangers of middle age, will be familiar as a twice-told tale.

Doubtless many will be charmed to meet Elsie Lindtner again, when she has passed through the dreaded furnace of her “forties,” and is still keeping the spark of inextinguishable youthfulness alive within her, by gambling at Monte Carlo, travelling in Greece with Jeanne of the flaming hair, fencing in London, riding in New York, and finally finding happiness and salvation in the adoption of a small offscouring of the streets.

But for those who may have missed reading the little masterpiece of modern femininity which only a short time ago set a whole continent by the ears, some sort of key is, possibly, necessary to the enjoyment of “Elsie Lindtner.”

In “The Dangerous Age” Elsie Lindtner writes an autobiographical letter to Joergen Malthe, the rising young architect, who has been her ardent admirer. She tells him now that her mother died when she was born, and her father was bankrupt, and lived disgraced in retirement, while she was left to the care of a servant girl.

From her she learnt that lack of money was the cause of their sordid life, and from that moment she worshipped money.

“I sometimes buried a coin that had been given me,” she writes, “as a dog buries a bone.”

When she went to school little Elsbeth Bugge was soon informed that she was “the prettiest girl in the school”; that a pretty face was worth a fortune.

“From that moment I entered upon the accursed cult of my person which absorbed the rest of my childhood and all my first youth.... I avoided the sun lest I should get freckles; I collected rain water for washing; I slept with gloves, and though I adored sweets, I refrained from eating them on account of my teeth. I spent hours brushing my hair.”

One day when she came home she found the only big mirror in the house had been transferred from her father’s room and hung in her own.

“I made myself quite ill with excitement, and the maid had to put me to bed. But later on, when the house was quiet, I got up and lit my lamp. I spent hours gazing at myself in the glass. There I sat till the sun rose.”

Then follows an account of how this child, scarcely in her teens, positively set her cap at a rich, elderly widower, because he had a fine house.

“My brain reeled as I said to myself, ‘Some day I will live in that house as wife of the Chief Magistrate.’”

The precociousness of Marie Bashkirtseff who fell in love with a duke when she ought to have been playing with her dolls, pales into insignificance beside this confession.

Elsie left school and went back to Denmark engaged to Herr von Brincken, the Chief Magistrate, but he had heart disease and she did not marry him. Instead she married Richard Lindtner, a wealthy Dane, and made her home with him in the Old Market Place at Copenhagen, where for twenty-two years she was, to outward appearances, a happy and contented wife.

“I allowed my senses to be inflamed while my mind remained cold and my heart contracted with disgust. I consciously profaned the sacred words of love by applying them to a man whom I chose for his money. Meanwhile, I developed into the frivolous society woman everybody took me to be. Every woman wears the mask which best suits her purpose. My mask was my smile....”

It is only in this book, the second instalment of Elsie Lindtner’s fragmentary diary and correspondence, that she gives us a reason for leaving her husband after twenty-two years of married life, the wish that he should have children. In “The Dangerous Age” she hints at other and various reasons. To her friend and cousin, Lili Rothe, the perfect wife and mother of “lanky daughters,” who could love another man passionately without ceasing to love her husband, she writes, when announcing her divorce, “There is no special reason ... none at least that is explicable to the world. As far as I know Richard has no entanglements, and I have no lover. There is no shadow of a scandal connected with our separation beyond that which must inevitably arise when two middle-aged partners throw down their cards in the middle of a rubber.... My real reason is so simple and clear that few will be content to accept it.... You know that Richard and I have got on as well as two people of opposite sex can do. There has never been an angry word between us. But one day the impulse—or whatever you like to call it—took possession of me that I must live alone—quite alone, and all to myself. Call it an absurd idea ... call it hysteria—which, perhaps, it is—I must get right away from everybody and everything. Joergen Malthe has planned and built a little villa for me in the belief that it was for some one else. The house is on an island, the name of which I will keep to myself for the present.”

In her self-communings, however, she never disguises the fact that escape from boredom was the main motive of her returning to the White Villa.

“Richard is still travelling, and entertains me scrupulously with accounts of the sights he sees and his lonely nights.... As in the past, he bores me with his interminable descriptions, and his whole middle-class outlook....”

Richard’s neatness and tidy ways bored her; his correctness in the convenances; even his way of eating, and “to watch him eat was a daily torture.”

“Sundays were no better in the Old Market Place. There I had Richard from morning till night. To be bored alone is bad; to be bored in the society of one other person is much worse. To think that Richard never noticed it! His incessant talk reminded me of a mill-wheel, and I felt as though all the flour were blowing into my eyes.”

In another place she says: “I am now sure that even if the difference in our own age did not exist, I could never marry Malthe.... I could do foolish, even mean things for the sake of the one man I loved with all my heart.... But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!”

The terrible part of home-life is that every piece of furniture in the house forms a link in the chain which binds two married people long after love has died out—if indeed it ever existed. Two human beings—who differ as much as two human beings always must do—are forced to adopt the same tastes, the same outlook. The home is built upon this incessant conflict.

“How often Richard and I gave way to each other with a consideration masking an annoyance that rankled more than a violent quarrel.... What a profound contempt I felt for his tastes and, without saying so, how he disapproved of mine. No, his home was not mine, although we lived in it like an ideal couple. My person for his money—that was the bargain crudely but truthfully expressed.”

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Even in her White Villa, on its island with a forest of her very own, Elsie Lindtner, to her intense disappointment, was bored. She lived there with two servants, Torp, the cook (a delightful figure), who believed in spooks, and whose teeth chattered when she told ghost stories; and Jeanne, the mysterious young housemaid with “amber eyes” and hair that glowed like red fungi against the snow, who wore silk stockings, and won Elsie’s heart by admiring and dressing Elsie’s own wonderful hair. Jeanne became the salient interest in Elsie’s hermit life on the island, and was promoted to the intimacy of companion and confidante. It was Jeanne who arranged the flowers artistically with her “long, pointed fingers,” and picked up her skirts disdainfully when she passed the flirtatious gardener, to whose fascinations Torp, the cook, became a hapless prey. Torp “made herself thin in collecting fat chickens for him,” and he played cards with her in the basement kitchen.

Jeanne rowed hard in the little white boat across the lake to catch the last post with Elsie’s fatal invitation to Malthe. “I will never part with Jeanne,” Elsie said as she watched her. Then she wandered at random in the woods and fields, and scarcely seemed to feel the ground under her feet. The flowers smelt so sweet, and she was so deeply moved.

“How can I sleep? I feel I must stay awake until my letter is in his hands.... Now it is speeding to him through the quiet night. The letter yearns towards him as I do myself.... I am young again, yes, young, young! How blue the night is.”

But she could not, alas, young as she felt, get into the white embroidered muslin which used to become her so well, and Malthe’s first glance told her all.

“He cast down his eyes so that he might not hurt me again.” One reads of tears of blood. “... During the few hours he spent in my house I think we smiled ‘smiles of blood.’”

Malthe left the White Villa the same night, and said at parting, “I feel like the worst of criminals.”

After this shattering blow Elsie in her despair craved for even the boring society of the husband she had deserted. She was, to use her own expression, “greedy of Richard’s caresses,” and invited him, too, to visit her on her island. But Richard declined altogether. He had just become engaged to a girl, “a mere chit of nineteen.”

“He has made a fool of me! I am done for. Nothing is left to me but to efface myself as soon as possible.”

Elsie Lindtner’s method of effacing herself for the second time was to quit her desert island, and take a Cook’s tour round the world with Jeanne.

Thus it happens that we renew acquaintance with her breaking the bank at Monte Carlo in the first pages of this book to which she has given her own name, though it might just as appropriately have been entitled “More Dangerous Age Reflections.” For here, again, the “transition” is the absorbing topic of Elsie Lindtner’s thoughts and correspondence; one might almost say it is “the bee in her bonnet.” Even when she has emerged triumphantly, as she boasts afterwards, from its perils, and has found a new source of interest and happiness in the street arab whom she has adopted, she seems unable to keep the subject out of her conversation and letters. She goes so far as to warn strangers of the “stealthy footsteps of the approaching years,” and disputes with her dear friend, the extraordinary widow, Magna Wellmann, which of them came through those years, “when we are all more or less mad,” with the greatest éclat.

In “Elsie Lindtner” we miss the mise en scène of the White Villa on the island, with its forest and lake, for when Elsie re-visits it with Kelly, it hardly seems the same place, with no Torp and no gardener.... We miss, too, the first, fine, careless rapture of feminine revolt which characterises “The Dangerous Age,” and the Jeanne of these pages is not so vivid as the Jeanne of the former book. In compensation we have more of Magna, and we have Lili Rothe’s love-letters—which were addressed but never sent to the man she loved. Also, as in the previous volume, we have Elsie Lindtner’s letters, with their strange, pathetic eloquence, marvellously revealing a woman’s complicated soul. Their literary merit and their value as a picture of life cannot fail to impress all readers.

Beatrice Marshall.

ELSIE LINDTNER

Elsie Lindtner

Monte Carlo.

Dear Richard,

Thank you for the money, and forgive my audacious telegram. I am directing this letter to your office, as it has nothing to do with domestic affairs.

You really must help me. We, Jeanne and I, are stranded here like a pair of adventuresses, and don’t know what to do. I have wired to my lawyer, who has simply replied with an unconditional “No.” The creature seems to think he has the right to manage my fortune as well as myself. Naturally, I find it far from pleasant to be obliged to apply to you, but you are the only person I can think of to whom I can turn without risking a refusal.

I have been gambling, winning and losing, finally losing. I am overdrawn, and the last draft which Riise had the grace to send me is gone.

Your money kept me going for two hours, but now that is gone, too. I have pawned the few valuables I possessed, but I am determined to win everything back. So please don’t give me good advice; instead, go and talk to Riise. Explain to him that it is urgent, and I must have the money. I am quite indifferent as to what becomes of the capital. I don’t mind paying dearly for this spree—or whatever you like to call it—and being poor afterwards in consequence. If the matter goes awry, you’ll hear nothing more of Elsie Lindtner. I shall neither take poison nor shoot myself. There is a more comfortable way out of it. A Brazilian, whom I don’t like, has lent me a big sum of money. If I borrow any more of him, it’ll have to come to a bargain. Make Riise sell the stock, even at a heavy loss, I must have money. Meanwhile send me all you can spare at the moment by cheque. I hope you continue to be as happy as ever.

With many thanks in advance,

Yours,

Elsie.

Monte Carlo.

Dear Richard,

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Accept my thanks for your prompt and ready help. All the same, I could not wait till it came, and borrowed again from the Brazilian. His obnoxious money has brought me luck. If it had been the other way about—well, never mind. It was a mad, desperate plunge on my part. Now that it is over I cannot understand how I could nerve myself for it. But I have won. The night before last I raked in two hundred and fifty thousand francs besides all that I had lost. After that I laid down to sleep. Your money has just arrived. I shall send it back at once with what you sent me before, and the amount I have wrung out of Riise. Jeanne has started packing.

To-morrow we leave here. We are going for Jeanne’s sake. She has taken my gambling too much to heart.

Now, if you possibly can, forget this little episode. I wasn’t completely myself. It’s all over, and too late to repent. We intend to spend the rest of the winter in Tangiers and Cairo, and probably in Helvan. Jeanne wants to go to India, and I have no objection so long as the journey is not too difficult. At all events, we shall spend a few weeks in Paris, just to fit ourselves out stylishly.

It is positively disgraceful of me that I have forgotten to congratulate you on the birth of your son and heir. How I should like to see your paternal countenance—you might send me a photograph of yourself with the Crown Prince, and now, farewell, till circumstances throw us together again.

Elsie.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

How long can things go on like this? We wander hither and thither, and have no abiding place, as if we were fugitives condemned to be eternally on the move. And we feign enjoyment of this perpetual unsettlement. Jeanne has long ago seen through the pitiable farce, but she continues to play her part loyally out of gratitude for the small kindness I have shown her. We get on quite well together. Jeanne reads in my face when it is best to speak, and when to be silent.

She is happiest on shore with terra firma beneath her feet, while I like best the gliding days and nights on board ship; the sky above, the sea beneath me, my brain vacant, and all my senses lulled to sleep. It reminds me of the early days on my solitary island, when every trifling incident was an affair of huge importance. The flight of a seagull, the top of a mast above the horizon—a ship sailing by in the night. We spend the day on our deck chairs, half dozing over a book, or conversing in a company voice; but at night we throw ulsters over our nightgowns and pace the deck, our natures expanding like flowers which only shed their perfume after dark.

I have become very fond of Jeanne. Her poor, withered heart, too early developed, too soon faded, awakes a certain gentle compassion within me. All my opinions are accepted by her eagerly as golden rules for the ordering of life. If only I could forget! existence might be bearable. But I cannot forget. The glance which showed me the corpse of his love follows me continually everywhere. The humiliation in that glance! I don’t love him, and I don’t hate him. I am getting too lukewarm to hate. But contempt rankles—Jeanne is careful to say nothing that can hurt me, and yet sometimes she hurts me by being too tactfully silent! I don’t want to be pitied, so we while away hours over our toilette.

How long can it go on?

Athens.

Here it is as nice as anywhere else. I struggle bravely to let myself be enchanted with Greece’s past, but in reality I care as little about it as I care for the potshares on the Keramaikos.

We are attending Professor Dörpfeld’s lectures on “The Acropolis,” and I am more interested in the way the man says things than in concentrating my mind on what he says. He has made himself so thoroughly familiar with the plastic beauty of the world, that finally the invisible words that fall from his lips seem to have become plastic, too. I take no interest in why the pillars are thickest in the middle. It is the olive groves, and the lights and shadows flitting over Athens, that charm and engross me.

Jeanne takes it all in like a gaping-mouthed schoolgirl; she studies the history of art in the hotel. I have given her leave to go on an excavating expedition, but without me. I strongly object to riding through snow up to my waist, sleeping in tents on the bare ground, and living on mutton and canned goods. My laziness is growing.

Luxor.

I am uneasy about Jeanne. She is strung up to a state of enthusiasm which alienates me. Is it travelling that has developed her, or are her hitherto dormant abilities awakening? We are simply travelling to kill time, but she takes everything with the same tremendous seriousness as that day in Berlin when she first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She regards me as if it were long ago an accepted fact that we each exist for ourselves, alone in our separate worlds. She skips half the meals to roam about among the temples. To-night we sat on top of the great pylon and watched the sun go down. For me it was just like a beautiful decorative effect at the theatre. I couldn’t help thinking of “Aïda.” She wouldn’t come in when I did, and when I suggested that the night air was chilly she answered quite snappishly, “I wish to see the moon illumine the classic sea.” Of course, I left her alone, but I couldn’t sleep, and at about midnight I heard her come back. My door was open, and I called her in. She sat down on the end of my bed and was crying. What can be the matter with her?

I am not going to torment her with questions. She shall be free to come and go as she chooses—so long as she spares me the paeans of an enthusiasm which I cannot share. It is all very well here but I prefer myself in the Paris boulevards, Unter den Linden, and Bond Street. I feel so poverty-stricken when I see others full of emotional élan.

Yes, that is it. That is why I am nervous about Jeanne’s enthusiasm for art. She reminds me of old days when Malthe, in my yellow room looking over the market-place, told me of his travels, and I deluded myself into imagining I understood what he was talking about....

And so this phase has come to an end, too! I had quite thought that Jeanne had sold herself to me for life. But it was not to be, after all. I might have prevented it. Perhaps she was waiting for a word from me. Still, it is best that we should part. Let her put her abilities to the test, by all means. She will soon have had enough of work, and I am in a position of being able to wait. Now I shall go to America, and if I find that bores me, too, God only knows if I shan’t give in and accept the Brazilian. His method of courtship, at least, is as systematic as a persecution. And at bottom I am flattered, that still—still; but for how much longer? I am deemed desirable. I ask myself in moments of doubt whether I should be even that, without the aid of Poiret and Worth.

Dear Jeanne,—Little travelling companion.

So our paths separate—temporarily, or for ever—neither of us can say which. But I feel that it is best to part, and I am not at all sad or hurt. Two years is a good long time for two people to have lived together, and we have both derived some profit from those years. For me the profit lies also in their coming to an end, for you that you have found life worth living. As I said before, I strongly advise you to go through the whole training, which will prove whether you have creative talent, or your art is merely suited to commercial purposes. I shouldn’t be surprised, indeed, if you became a designer of buildings—architect is, I suppose, too ambitious a word to apply to a woman—and as Greek and Egyptian temples are likely to be your speciality, you are hardly destined to be popular.

Now we have discussed all the practical points. I think you know that I wish you absolutely to enjoy your time in Paris. Enjoy it to the full, but don’t commit any irrevocable follies!

You will get these lines from London, where I am amusing myself by a short obesity cure. Imagine us fencing, like small children in black satin knickerbockers and white sweaters! Several ladies from Court take part in the “class.” Afterwards we have a brisk but delightful hip-massage, and that alone makes it worth the trouble. Directly I am satisfied with the slimness of my exterior, I start for New York. You were never very happy over there, but for me that city has a peculiar fascination. I don’t know myself what it consists in.

I beg you, from my heart, Jeanne, that you will always consider me as a friend to whom you can comfortably tell everything, and come to for sympathy and advice, whether in sorrow or happiness. You will, Jeanne, won’t you? and don’t neglect your appearance. Work may absorb you for a time, but that kind of thing is a transitory craze in a woman of your disposition. Your heritage is your appearance, remember.

Good-bye for the present, and “good luck,” little travelling companion.

Elsie Lindtner.

Dearest Jeanne,

Your last letter—to put it mildly—is very exaggerated. Frankly, it is positively hysterical. Why should you harp to me on your “guilt,” or your everlasting gratitude, on your privilege of making some sacrifice for me. I don’t understand a word of the whole rigmarole, not a single word. I don’t see the point of it in the least. Here I am perfectly content in my own solitary way, which is not a bit misanthropic, and my own desire is that you should feel content, too. Don’t you like Paris? You really needn’t be afraid to say so—or is it the work that you are sick of? If so, it is only what I have long expected.

According to my opinion, you belong to those human luxuries whose presence in the world are quite superfluous, but who have a certain genius through their mere existence alone of making life more tolerable for others. Your place is either this, or in the midst of a grande passion (heaven forbid) in which you would screw yourself into a bread pellet, to be held in some one else’s mouth. I can see you like The Princess on the Pea, scorning everything, or I can see you on your knees scouring steps for the man you love.

But I should like to see the man you were able to love.

Perhaps you are in love? That idea has suddenly occurred to me, though it seems highly improbable. Now, however, that I have read through your last nonsensical letter again, I believe that I have really hit on the right solution.

You are in love, and out of feelings of mistaken gratitude, you do not like to tell me. Jeanne, Jeanne! Will you for my sake be an old maid? It is very sweet of you, but a little too much to expect. Besides, it is quite unnecessary. I am not going to lie, and pretend that it will not cost me something to give up my little fairy-tale princess with the beautiful hands. Not only my hair, but my shamefully overcultivated taste is missing you, with whom I was able to exchange ideas. An empty place on my balcony that will never be filled again till the aforesaid maiden sits in it with the sunlight shining on her and on the river, and on the town which is the town of all others.

But, Jeanne, our paths have diverged, and they can never again unite. You are not in the least fit to be in my company. You don’t want me, but life, and joyousness. May you find it, no matter whether, like me, you sell yourself, and are shut up in a golden cage, whether you live your own fairy-tale, and realise the mirage of your dreams, or whether you develop into an artist. Only with me you would have no peace.

I noticed how you beat your wings when we were together, how you pined and tortured yourself to adopt the pose that pleased me. How for my sake you acted a part.

Instead of writing sheets, I send you these lines, and entreat you to answer by telegram so that you may tell me in the fewest possible words what has happened to you.

I am, God knows, so curious that I should like to send you a wire a yard long. But I must rule my spirit so as to take this modern city of New York.

Your

Elsie.

Jeanne, Jeanne, Jeanne!

Only that! Thank God, only that. How infinitely comforting a telegram with its few concise words can be.

Don’t let this matter worry you further. Of course, I’ll take the child to my heart; or still better, I will adopt the child.

After all, it’s much the same to me whether I have a camera, cacti, or a little child for a hobby. You needn’t be afraid that I shall plant it in a flower-pot like a cutting, or pin it into my lace collection. It shall, I promise you, be properly cared for, not by me, but through me. I will engage the best nurse money can procure. If you like, too, I will sail with the nurse over the whole width of the Atlantic to receive the little eel in person. The more I think it over, the more excellent the plan seems to me. You will have no bother, will not be interrupted in your career, and I shall add to the long list of my crazes one more item. To prevent there being any sort of misunderstanding about it, I am perfectly confident that providing for the little legacy will be a source of new enjoyment to me.

I only make one condition, and that is, if the affair becomes too complete I may be allowed to put “our child” out to nurse.

It is to be hoped that the father has not won a fraction of your heart. I can well imagine that he is some young artist whom you have met at the class. He gazed at your hair till he was sick, which is not at all to be wondered at, and you forgot momentarily that you had long ago abjured all folly.

Write me more details as to whether you approve; when “it” is expected, and so on. I needn’t advise you, of course, to leave Paris before the change in your exterior attracts notice. I am thinking a great deal of you, Jeanne, little Jeanne.

Your

Elsie.

Dear Magna Wellmann,

And I am the woman who thought you had forgotten me, or that you still bore me a grudge for that letter which I wrote you four—no, it is already five—years ago.

Now I sit here and ponder whether the greatest transformation has been worked in you, or in me. You, at all events, are not the same, and I believe that I am not. But at our age, one is long past growing and developing.

You who of old were like a dry autumn leaf whirled before the wind, have proved yourself all at once to have a strength and courage which make me ashamed. Who has lulled your senses so to rest? The one “great” love? No, I will not ask questions, though a whole host of them pulsate within me. And you are not a bit afraid? You speak of it as if it were a mere frolic. You wonderful human creature, Magna. Other women suffer intolerably during the nine months of pregnancy, and grow irritable and ugly. But you are blooming as if it were the most perfectly natural condition to be in. What a contrast to your ordinary mood and your old escapades. You are not in the least afraid to bring a child into the world at your age; and in such circumstances every line of your letter breathes freshness and health, and there is no disguising it.

Do you know, your letter awoke in me the first longing for Denmark since I packed my boxes and went out into the wide world.

I have become an alien. Five years is not such a very long time, though long enough to render a person countryless. Richard in his pleasant way, keeps me au courant with what he calls the “main movements” of our circle, so I know that you have been banned and ostracised. I cannot say that I think it is altogether undeserved. You know that I insist on good form outwardly as well as inwardly, and, really, Magna, I cannot picture myself behaving as you have done, any more than I can picture myself going out in society in a nightdress with my hair hanging down in a pigtail. But, of course, it is your affair.

For the most part I take no interest in what goes on at home. It reminds me too much of looking at a drop of water through a microscope. If, by any chance, I come across a Danish newspaper, I read nothing but the obituaries, and even they do not rouse a shadow of emotion in my soul.

Yet there are fates which, out of curiosity or fellow-feeling, appeal to me. And yours is one of them. When Richard wrote, “Frau Wellmann’s latest makes her ‘impossible’ in this part of the world,” I could not help smiling. You made yourself impossible years ago. It is true, Professor Wellmann’s name and social status have sheltered and held a restraining hand over you, that is to say, up till now.

But now it has come to an actual scandal. You parade your shame on the housetops of Copenhagen, instead of going away and hushing it up.

By the bye, how many small affairs were there not year after year hushed up in our set? The dear ladies even were not afraid to whisper about them to each other. And you, you even, delight in having a child of the peculiar kind that we call illegitimate. Magna, Magna! I am not going to suppose that behind it all is a spark of malicious joy in challenging the crême de la crême. That would be a poor joke. Neither can I believe that your motive has anything to do with love for the father of your illegitimate child.

You write so beautifully about the feeling that life is growing within you. In this respect, I am a stranger, and absolutely blind. I have never felt the smallest sensation of longing to feel that life is growing within me. Perhaps I am even incapable of understanding your expression. Yet it touches me.

You were entering on a period of severe trial for yourself and for the children, and the time of trial will not end with your confinement. There will most certainly have to be an explanation, and preferably an explanation that will bring as little injury as possible to the children. Have you thought of this? Don’t put off the inevitable too long, or others may be before you. The children cannot—it would be terrible if they could—understand the whole, so the question is how to invent a fable which will best lull their reflection.

Many will judge you because you have done what is not customary and defied the usages of society; others will judge you out of envy, because they have not had the courage to do it themselves. Every one who has refrained through fear of disgrace and shame, will hurl a stone at you. Likewise the childless women. If I were still in the Old Market Place, I should flout you, too. Still, there are a whole lot of free-thinking human creatures who will judge you not on account of the child, but for the children’s sake. You may shrug your shoulders at the others, but you can’t get away from the shadow which you are casting on the children.

Well, now that I have discoursed to you in this extremely reasonable manner, I may with a clear conscience extend my hands across the ocean and say, “Good luck, Magna.”

When the atmosphere becomes too hot to hold you, then take refuge with me. I live here, fourteen storeys high, on Riverside Drive. My name is on the door in characters as small as those on a postage stamp. It is the fashion here, and the letters are delivered to the porter. The house is magnificently arranged, and is as light as a studio. I steadily believe that I shall rest my bones in some peaceful burial ground here. And as it’s the custom to adorn and paint the dead till they look twenty or thirty years younger than when they were alive, you will comprehend how that appeals to the vanity of one who has warded off the burden of age. I should just like to know how any woman devoid of vanity could exist in this city of light and sunshine. I belong to two or three clubs where ladies of seventy and eighty congregate, with porcelain complexions, powdered coiffures, and Gainsborough hats. Don’t imagine for a moment that they are ludicrous. They possess a dignity and joy in existence which makes me think that they must pass their nights in a bath of youth.

There is a glamour of festivity hanging over this place. Not in the slums; but there of course, you needn’t go. New York’s poor have a totally different aspect and manner of behaviour from the poor of European cities, where they rub against travellers with their sores and crutches. In all these years I have only seen two human beings who didn’t belong to Fifth Avenue. An Italian and his wife lay and sunned themselves on the curb and ate dirty vegetables out of a rusty tin. No one sent them off, but the whole traffic of the street gave them a wide berth, as if they had been a pair of plague-stricken patients.

I ride on horseback every day till I am dead tired, in a salmon-coloured habit and a slouch hat over my eyebrows. My master—a pitiful wreck of a once brilliant Scottish nobleman—at first objected to my riding en cavalier. But as I remained obstinate, he left me to my fate till one fine day he was seized with admiration for my mastery of the horse, and now we are good friends. We ride alternately in Central Park, which is indescribably lovely when all the beds are aglow with rhododendrons in bloom, and in New Jersey, which is still unspoilt Nature. Sundays, as a rule, we form quite a cavalcade, and then we amuse ourselves like children. These people who are outwardly stiff and reserved, and inwardly do not overburden their souls with super-culture, have a wholly remarkable and infectious capacity for sucking honey out of the most trifling banalities of existence. We chat about the sun, moon and stars, about our horses, our ravenous appetites, and the recently discovered Rembrandt, and never about our neighbours. We never backbite.

At the end of such a day, when I am resting after my bath, I seem to myself like a being with life all before me.

In truth, I have found congenial calm. I play bridge through the long winter mornings at the Astor Hotel Club, or go to lectures on psychology, followed by luxurious luncheons during which Madame Homer and Signor Caruso sing to us, not in the intervals, but while we eat!

The waiters go round pouring out coffee the whole time, while we sit in a rosy twilight. Every one pays every one else little choice and sincerely-meant compliments. Call it an empty life, if you like, and I won’t deny that it is.

You ask what I have been doing since I took flight from my now desolate and dilapidated villa. If I only knew myself I would tell you. It all seems so long ago I travelled about with Jeanne, my young housemate and friend, and we really did nothing but kill time.

Rumours of my Monte Carlo period have no doubt penetrated to Denmark. I admit it was an ugly experience. Never in all my life had I imagined that I could become the prey of this passion, but I caught the fever so badly that I conducted myself as shamelessly as the most hardened professional gamblers. I certainly believe that during those days I was scarcely responsible. If the tide of fortune had not turned I should have gambled away every farthing I possess. But things went so well that I am living to-day on my winnings, without touching my dividends.

Jeanne is still in Paris, where she has been for the last two years. She intends to qualify for some industrial art, for she has an indisputable and highly original talent. Lately I have had a very significant letter from her, but I may not divulge its contents. If things turn out, as at present seems likely, my life may undergo a complete re-arrangement.

I must tell you about my latest craze. I have had quite a dozen little crazes in this one year alone. It is a splendid distraction. Well, my latest is collecting dwarf cacti and Japanese dwarf trees, which you hardly ever see in Denmark. They are only a few inches high, and incredibly old. You buy them in fat boxes, miniature imitations of Japanese gardens with rivers, bridges, and porcelain cupolas and tea-houses. They are entrancing. Fortunately, a gardener tends them; otherwise they would die of neglect. The care of plants is no more in my line than the care of children, or any other live things. If I had the gift I should have a choice little aquarium with goldfishes and electric light and illuminations.

Imagine Richard a paterfamilias and domestic tyrant! Yes, indeed, Magna, everything is changed.

Now, I really have told you all about myself. I don’t believe there is a single craving of my soul that I have not disclosed to you. It’s not my fault that the result of these disclosures appears so miserably poor. How old is Jarl now? Sixteen or more? It is a good thing that Agnete is soon to be married. Write again soon, Magna. I promise to answer.

Elsie Lindtner.

Dear Jeanne,

It may be the consequence of your condition, but really, I am getting quite concerned about your letters. I thought everything was settled for good when I promised to relieve you of responsibility by taking the child. And now you begin posing new riddles.

What secret is it that you cannot betray? Why do you talk about hiding yourself in the remotest desert? From whom should you hide? For what reason? Why do you speak of desecration, and say you wish you could die before the child is born? You hate to do it a wrong? What wrong?

Is this man married? If so, his wife needn’t know that you are going to give birth to a child. You don’t want to marry him; or do you?

If I may advise you, Jeanne, I should suggest your leaving the future to take care of itself, till you are established in peace and quietness in some pretty neighbourhood. What do you say to Provence? At the moment you are nothing but a bundle of nerves, and I have half a mind to come across and do what I can to help you. But I am too lazy. To do anything to help people when it involves trouble, is not my métier; for you, even, I cannot take trouble, though I love you.

But if there is anything on your mind, please let me know what it is, for, as I said before, I am unable to make sense out of the nonsense you have written. Write as often and at as great length as you like, and the day will come, I hope, when I shall at last grasp your meaning. Is it a human being that is lacking, one with whom you can really talk? I am experiencing every day a crowd of little stupid things, that keep me going in a most agreeable fashion. But I am chiefly taken up with cherishing and cultivating my own precious appearance. Altogether, I was much more alive when we two sat together in our White Villa on the island, and saw the leaves falling from the trees.

Your

Elsie.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Jeanne ... Malthe ... Jeanne ... Malthe.

Jeanne and he ... he and Jeanne....

I must try to understand it. Those two....

And, it was the child of these two, their child, I wanted to adopt....

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Two days have passed, but I am no nearer understanding. I go round and round in an empty circle, and say to myself, “Jeanne and Malthe—Malthe and Jeanne.” And I expect to be overcome by a heart-rending agony. But so far as I can judge, neither my heart nor my mind are affected. My nerves, too, are perfectly composed. I am, in fact, only petrified with astonishment.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Why don’t I suffer? What has become of the love I once felt. Where is it?—or—I understand those two so exactly. It’s myself that I don’t understand. I can give them my blessing with the easiest and most serene conscience in the world. I can even rejoice that these two, just these two, have found each other so futile; then am I so inexplicably, egregiously futile?

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I have begun to take delight in travelling by the Subway. People there don’t pose. They are in too great a hurry to put on masks. Extraordinary how impressive breeding is when it is united with good clothes. The train can be so full that there is often a double row extending from one end of the car to the other, hanging on to the round leather rings with coarse, toil-worn, or delicate kid-gloved hands. Some one always makes room for me, but I also take my time to form the desired expression on my face. To-day a poor woman sat next to me with two or three little wreaths on her lap. She wore a dusty mourning veil thrown over her hair.

She cried the whole way; the veil was so shabby that I calculated the child must have died a long time ago. Her grief was still fresh. Mine has never existed. I had thought my life at least contained what is called a great sorrow. But I have only draped an empty space with the trappings of sorrow....

I must write to Jeanne.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Dear Little Travelling Companion,

This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.

Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. Neither has he. Yet you fancy that your letters—your “confession,” has caused me pain. Oh, no! Alas! it has done nothing of the kind. I say, alas! because I should so like to believe myself, that I had once in my life loved with my whole heart. Now I see it must have been all imagination. It can’t be explained otherwise—a delusion, a myth—anything you like. Perhaps a charming dream.

Well, the dream is over; that is the only thing I am certain about. All that remains of it is the memory of a good friend who, by a truly magical freak of fate, has found the one woman, in my opinion, suited to him.

Jeanne, I am not disguising the facts. This is the first and the last time, too, for that matter—that the subject of Malthe and myself is mentioned between us.

The whole time you and I were knocking about the world like homeless vagrants, you never referred to it, or let drop a hint, that you knew the whole humiliating connection. Though I knew that you knew, and that raised you in my esteem as a human creature to an extraordinary degree. I think so highly of Malthe that you alone seem to me good enough for him. So you see what you write about committing a “robbery” has no point. And more than that, I can tell you I am one of those women ill adapted to live with, much less to love, another human being. I am quite clear now about this. You, on the contrary, in compensation for your joyless youth, are endowed with the capacity for self-sacrifice and yielding. For you it will be a positive delight to abandon your ego, and let it be absorbed by his. For me such a thing is inconceivable.

There is no necessity to recur any more to the past—at least as far as I am concerned. On your behalf we unfortunately have to do it. Much more than the news itself, does your question, shall you speak or be silent, perplex my brain and excite my emotions.

If my position was now what it once was, and my views of life what they once were, I should answer decidedly: Keep your lips closed, and the secret that concerns only you, locked in your heart! But now there are other factors to consider. I am changed. Time and life—I scarcely know what—have changed me—and you are not like the majority of women, and Malthe is not a man like other men.

You may perhaps cause him a never-ending torment by speaking. Be clear on this, or you may cause yourself no less pain by keeping silent, and letting what is past and over for ever be forgotten. I know you, Jeanne; every day and every hour you will despise yourself more and more because his belief in you is so boundless.

You can’t be silent. You will be compelled to lie. What to ninety-nine people out of a hundred would be simple and natural enough will undermine not only your self-respect, but your joy in life. On the other hand, you have never loved. The thing you call your past, has really had no significance for you. Why should it be unearthed now, and dragged into the glare of day? Why should something that meant nothing but words to you, be made crucial? Are you two, you and he, to spend the most beautiful years of your love in exhuming corpses and taking them about with you wherever you go?

Joergen Malthe is not as other men are. He will never reproach you, but he will grieve, and you will grieve with him.

You see, I am unable to advise you. Perhaps I have no right to take the responsibility upon me. I have often talked by the hour to your future husband. But as far as I can remember, we never touched on the topic of woman in the abstract. Thus it comes about that I am ignorant of what Malthe’s views are.

And yet—Malthe is the father of your child. The father of your unborn child.

Speak, Jeanne, speak openly and without fear. It will be setting up no defence for having yielded to his inclinations, but he will find in it a means of explaining and defending what happened before his time; for Joergen Malthe is not like other men.

If he has thought it right and natural that the woman he loves should become his in the way you have become his, he will think it right and natural that you should have exercised the sovereignty over your person before you knew him. All you have got to tell him afterwards is that you love him and that you have never loved any one but him.

I seem to myself at this moment so very ancient. Such an eternity lies between then and now, but that is as it should be.

Little travelling companion with the red hair, let me see you helping him now in the prime of his manhood to build up his reputation, so that his name will become immortal. You understand how to see—how to enjoy. Pack your infant when it is born in a little trunk with perforated lid, and take it about with you, or leave it behind. Don’t let it be a hindrance or a barrier between you two in your joint lives.

There is a great deal more that I should like to write, but now I must go and dress. You know “Tristan and Isolde” always was my favourite opera.

I was going to urge you not to show this letter to Malthe, but, after all, I leave you a free hand in the matter.

For many reasons I believe that if he saw it the consequences would not be disastrous.

With many embraces. I wish you a happiness that will last through life.

Your

Elsie Lindtner.

You need not trouble to find me more lace patterns. I have presented my whole collection to the Metropolitan Museum. My new craze, dwarf cacti, amuses me far more—they can’t be enclosed in letters and newspapers unfortunately.

When did they first meet? It is no concern of mine, but I can’t help thinking much about it. Did they know each other before? Yes, of course. He looked after her when she passed through the room. From me he looked across at her—and compared. And after—yes, what after? Did he think continually of Jeanne as before he thought of me? Or is it merely because chance has thrown them together in Paris? Or is it possible that they did not recognise each other at first, and only discovered later where they had met for the first time? Have I played any part in their conversation? Have they clasped hands over my memory, as over a grave?

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I don’t grudge them their happiness. Jeanne is the right woman for him, and only a Joergen Malthe could satisfy and supplement Jeanne’s whole nature.

How has it come about that everything in me has gone to rest? I feel like a heap of faded leaves lying down somewhere in a deep hollow, where not a breath of wind reaches it, and it lulls itself to sleep.

I don’t live now as I used to live, and I have no goal to strive for; but I have no cares, much less do I feel in despair about anything. Truly, I am very comfortable in mind and body. I should not mind living for ever this sort of life. Yet at the same time I should feel no alarm if some one came and said, “You must die to-night.”

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

When I consider it in broad daylight, I have a heap of enjoyments, small and insignificant, but perfectly unclouded enjoyments.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Yes, here I am laid up with measles—at my age—a fiery rash, and everything else. Perhaps I shall get whooping-cough next? It would be much the best plan if one could have every childish complaint at once and have done with it. It is boring in this magnificent carbolic-scented clinic; but the nursing is good, and it is said to be healthy to be bored. I always fancied the much spoken about self-sacrifice nurses to be an old wives’ tale.

In the room next mine, there is the most passionate little monster of a boy nine months old, and no one would believe it, but all the nurses are willing to give up their sorely needed night’s rest for his sake. I, for my part, wish he was in a hot place.

And then they actually ask me if I wouldn’t like to have him “in my bed for a little.” Heaven protect me and my well-conditioned intellect! Oh! I pity the poor women who have several little children at the same time! I’d like to know how many mothers really feel for their children—because it is their children.

Richard will get it with that wonder of a child. He boasts about his teeth, but he says nothing about the pain getting those teeth has cost him.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Yesterday I had a visit from a convalescent, who went round paying visits to the patients who were still lying in bed. I shall make friends with her. She amuses me. How well I understood that there can be a certain charm in studying bacteria and bacilli—small causes, huge results.

Frankly, I thought at first that she had been in a reformatory. There was something about her that gave the impression that she must have been under restraint. I was quite prepared that she would confess to having committed some crime. But no, that wasn’t it.

She had only been in all innocence a nun for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years a nun! Think of it! There were the years, too, that she was pupil and novice, making altogether twenty-six years behind the walls of a convent, subjected to the convent discipline and the weary convent habit. And now she has broken loose, like a prisoner who makes a rope of his bedclothes to escape over walls to freedom.

She had compelled—how, she did not disclose—the Church to set her at liberty, and now was beginning to live her own life for the first time. The life which she left at sixteen she has now taken up again at the age of forty-two. She looks like a person of sixty.

I could not forbear putting the indiscreet question, why she had broken away? And she replied, what was evidently the truth, that when she noticed she was beginning to grow old, a doubt arose within her as to whether the life in the world outside was not richer than the life behind the convent walls. She has given all her large fortune to the Church, and now lives on a scanty allowance grudgingly doled out to her by one of the sisters.

But she is happy as a queen in two little rooms, where she is her own mistress, able to eat and drink when she wants to, and as much as she likes. And she can serve her God unbidden by the ding-dong of the chapel bell—for she has not abjured her faith.

The one desire of her heart now is to find a man who’ll marry her. Her modesty is certainly touching. She doesn’t mind who he is, or what he looks like, if only she may be granted the wonderful happiness of having a husband. I lied my utmost to comfort her.

And if she can’t get a husband, she intends to adopt a child.

A really sick, starving, miserable child. I said tamely, that if I cherished—as God forbid that I should—such a fad, I would, at all events, seek out a healthy, pretty, and well-nourished infant. Whereupon she answered, “I don’t want a child to live for my sake; I want to live for the sake of a child.” She is a fine, but rather queer creature. And she has promised to come and see me every day.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Sister Ethel has bet me a palm—she has obviously an empty tub in her room—that if once I had the little boy next door with me for an hour, I should take him to my heart.

I would rather give her the palm straight off, and have nothing to do with the little boy; but still, if it gives her any pleasure, well, I’ll have him this afternoon, but directly the hour is over, clean sheets.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

To my eternal shame I am bound to confess that I have lost the palm. It may be that all the nun’s sentimental gabble has affected my brain! I, who abhor the scent of little children, and shudder to touch them.

He lay perfectly still and squinted up at me, sucking a finger. It was the little finger. I really shouldn’t mind losing another palm, but my pride, God be praised, prevents my giving expression to the wish.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

He doesn’t cry when he is with me. Nobody can understand it. In the night when he was crying, I, foolish old person, rose from my bed of measles, and went to look in on him. I thought the nurse had gone away. It was rather a painful situation.

Dear Professor Rothe,[1]

Your letter was such a shock to me that I could not answer it at once.... That is why I sent you the brief telegram in reply, the words of which I am sorry I must repeat, “I know nothing about the matter.” Lili has never spoken of it to me, or made the least allusion which could cause me to suspect such a thing. I may truthfully say that I never heard her mention the name of Director Schlegel. My first idea was that Lili had gone out of her mind, and I was surprised that you, a medical man, should not have come to the same conclusion.

But, after thinking it over for the last two days, I have changed my opinion. I think I am beginning to understand what has happened, and I beg you to hold me alone responsible for what I am going to say.... I am only making suppositions. Lili has not broken her marriage vows. Any suspicion of such a thing is out of the question, her nature was too upright, too loyal.... If she appeared to you and the world happy in her married life, it was because she really was so. I entreat you to believe this.

Lili, who never told even a conventional lie, who watched over her children like an old-fashioned mother, careful of what they read and what plays they saw—how could she carry on an intrigue unknown to you and them? Perfectly impossible, my dear Professor. I don’t say that she didn’t speak the words you heard, but that you must have put a wrong interpretation on them.

Not once, but thousands of times, Lili has talked about you to me. She loved and honoured you. You were her ideal man, husband, and father.

She used literally to become eloquent on the subject of your operations.... She studied Latin in order that she might understand your scientific books, while, in spite of her natural repulsion from the sight of such things, she attended your anatomy classes and demonstrations.

When Lili said, “I love Schlegel and have loved him for years,” her words did not mean, “And all that time my love for you was extinct.”

No, Lili cared for Schlegel, and for you, too.... Probably you are saying to yourself, “A woman must love one man or the other.”

With some show of reason you will argue, “In leaving my house, at any rate, she proved that Schlegel alone claimed her affection.”

Nevertheless I maintain that you are wrong.

Lili showed every sign of a sane, well-balanced nature. Well, her famous serenity and calmness deceived us all. Behind this serene exterior was the most feminine of all feminine qualities—the fanciful imagination of the visionary. Do you or I know anything about her first girlish dreams? Have you, in spite of your happy life together, ever really understood her innermost soul? Forgive me, but I do not think you have.

When a man possesses a woman as completely as you possessed Lili, he thinks himself quite safe. You never doubted for a moment that, having you, she could wish for anything else.

You are not only a clever and capable man, you are kind, and an entertaining companion; in short, you have many excellent qualities which Lili exalted to the skies. But your nature is not very poetical; you are, in fact, rather prosaic, and only believe what you see.

Contrast this with Lili’s immense forbearance. You remember how we used to laugh when she defended some criminal who was beyond all defence or apology. Something intense and far-seeing came into her expression, and her heart, prompted such a line of argument which reason could not support. She stood all alone in her sympathy, facing cold and incredulous people.

Then recollect the pleasure it gave her to discuss religious and philosophical questions.

She was not “religious” in the common acceptation of the word. But she liked to get at the bottom of things, and to use her imagination. We others were indifferent or frankly bored.

And Lili was so gentle she gave way to us.

Recall, too, her passion for flowers. She felt a physical pang to see cut flowers with their stalks out of water. Once I saw her buy up a flower girl’s whole stock, because the poor things wanted water. You and your children have no love of flowers. As a doctor, you are inclined to think it unhealthy to have plants in your rooms; consequently there were none and Lili never grumbled.

Lili did not care for modern music. César Franck wearied her, and Wagner gave her a headache. An old-fashioned harpsichord would be her favourite instrument, whereas at home her daughters thundered out Rubinstein and Wagner upon a concert grand, and you, dear Professor, when in a good humour, strode about the house whistling horribly out of tune.

Finally, Lili liked quiet, musical speech, and she was surrounded by people who talked at the top of their voices.

... She was happy because she willed to be happy. She had made up her mind that she was the luckiest woman in existence ... happy in everything, and she was deeply grateful to you. But in the depths of her heart—so deep down that it never rose to the surface even as a dream—lay that secret trouble which has caused the present mischief.

I know nothing of her relations to Schlegel, but I think I may venture to say that they were chiefly limited to intercourse of the soul; ... and so were fatal. Have you ever noticed the timbre of Schlegel’s voice? He spoke slowly and so softly; I can quite believe it attracted your wife in the beginning; and that afterwards gradually, and almost imperceptibly, she gravitated towards him.

The man is now at death’s door, and can never explain what passed between them—even admitting that there was anything wrong. As far as I know, Schlegel was infatuated with a totally different woman. Had he been really in love with Lili, would he have been content with a few words and an occasional pressure of her hand?

Why, then, has Lili left you, and why does she refuse to give you an explanation? Why does she allow you to draw the worst conclusions?

I will tell you. Lili is in love with two men at the same time. Their different personalities and natures satisfy both sides of her character. If Schlegel had not fallen from his horse and broken his back, thereby losing all his faculties, Lili would have remained with you and continued to be a model wife and mother.

In the same way, had you been the victim of the accident, she would have forgotten all about Schlegel, and would have lived for you alone.

... Lili had not the strength to fight the first sharp anguish. The shock bewildered her, and the love of her imagination seemed to her at the moment the true one. She felt she was betraying you, Schlegel, and herself; and since self-sacrifice had become the law of her life, she was prepared to renounce everything as a proof of her love.

You, Professor Rothe, have acted very foolishly. You have done just what any average conventional man would have done. Your hurt vanity silenced the voice of your heart.

You had the choice of thinking two things: either Lili was mad, or she was responsible for her actions. You were convinced that she was sane, and playing you false in cold blood....

You write that you have only taken your two elder daughters into your confidence. How could you have found it in your heart to do this...?

Lili knew you better than I supposed. She knew that behind your apparent kindness there lurked a cold, self-satisfied nature. She understood that she would be accounted a stranger and a sinner in your house the moment you discovered in her a thought or sentiment that was not subordinate to your will.

You have let her go, believing that she had been playing a pretty part behind your back, and that I was her confidante, and perhaps also the instigator of her wicked deeds.

Lili has taken refuge with her children’s old nurse.

How significant! Lili, who had so many friends, knows by a subtler instinct that none of them would befriend her in her misfortune. If you, Professor Rothe, were a generous-hearted man, you would explain to the chief doctor at the Infirmary Lili’s great desire to stay near Schlegel until the end comes.

She loves you, and it would fill her with grateful joy.... If Lili had your consent to be near Schlegel she would certainly not refuse to come back to her wifely duties as soon as he was dead. At first she might not be able to conceal her grief, and then it would be your task to help her to regain her peace of mind.... Schlegel was a man, but had he been a portrait or a character in a novel, Lili would have fallen in love with him just the same, because her love was purely of the imagination.

You must do what you please. But one thing I wish you to understand.... If you are not going to act in the matter I shall act. I confess openly that I am a selfish woman, but I am very fond of Lili, and if you abandon her in this cruel and senseless way I shall have her to live with me here, and shall do my best to console her for the loss of an ungrateful husband, and a pack of stupid, undemonstrative children.

One of Lili’s tears is worth more than all your masculine ebulitions of wrath.

One word more before I finish. Lili, so far as I can remember, is a year older than I am. Could you not, woman’s specialist as you are, have found some excuse for her in this fact? Had Lili been fifty-eight or thirty-five, all this would never have happened. I do not care for strangers to look into my personal affairs, and although you are my cousin’s husband, you are practically a stranger to me. Nevertheless, I may remind you that women at our time of life pass through critical moments, as I know by daily experiences. A week or two ago it might have been impossible to write a letter such as this. I should probably have reeled off pages of incoherent abuse.

Show Lili that your love was not selfishness pure and simple.

With kind regards.

Sincerely yours,

Elsie Lindtner.

[1] Extracts from an earlier letter of Elsie Lindtner’s to Professor Rothe, in “The Dangerous Age,” are given here again, as they throw light on the episode which follows.

Dear Professor Rothe,

Lili has closed her eyes never to open them again. It will scarcely be a great blow to you and yours after what has passed; much more will it be a relief. For her, indeed, it was so.

I feel it my duty to Lili, not to you, to write this letter. You may make what use you please of it. It was I who procured Lili the sleeping draught, for which she had such a burning desire. With my hand in hers I sat beside her till she was cold, and I do not repent that I had the courage to commit what you, as a physician, will call a crime.

A few days before she fell asleep Lili entrusted a packet of letters to my care. I read them in the night, and now lay them in the coffin under her head. These letters were not to be read by the unauthorised, and you have become in relation to Lili one of the unauthorised.

You have called hers a harlot-nature—not in a moment of excitement, but because, after weighty consideration, you arrived at a conclusion to which the word was appropriate. It is not in my power to give you the satisfaction which you deserve, but I wish that the hour may come in which you will see what a desperate wrong you and your abominable children have done Lili.

Harlot-nature, indeed! You can say that of Lili to whom you were married for twenty years—Lili, the purest of beings!

You say, “She married me, she bore me children, she professed to love me, and all the time she had a lover behind my back. So she was of a harlot-nature!”

Professor Rothe, permit me to accompany you into your most private consulting room, the room in which you examine the most modest of your lady patients. Let me have it out with you, and inquire into your secret motives. It is possible that your modesty will be shocked, but you shall hear what I have to say on Lili’s behalf, and on those words, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

When you married her your choice was made according to the dictates of your heart, and fell on a very young girl who lived on the blue heights of idealism. She was your wife, your friend, the mother of your children, the good angel of your home. And would you dare add that she was your love also? Yes. You think that because she loved you, and you loved her, and because you took her in your arms as your wife, that she was, of course your love....

But I tell you Lili was never your love, and that she never had a lover. And the whole time you have known it perfectly well. Answer me, if you like, “There are thousands and thousands of women who, like Lili, are without feeling in this respect ... still she loved another, and so deceived me.”

Is a rose less red and fragrant, because there are thousands of other red sweet-smelling roses?

But Lili’s nature was so pure, so refined, that this deficiency as you would call it, did not exist for her. She knew what it meant, for she was not ignorant. She understood in others what she did not recognise in herself. She lived for you, her children, and her household, her own beautiful world, so essential was it for her to shed light and spread joy around her.

From this arose that wonderful harmony of her being, making of the non-waking of what was dormant within her, neither a trial nor a renunciation. If Lili had been blind she would have had the same happy nature, and would have learned the beauty of joyousness through the eyes of every seeing soul.

There never arose within her, as in the case of so many poor women, a conscious renunciation of the fire of the senses.

How infinitely she must have loved and reverenced you, to have been able to tolerate without complaint, without abhorrence and a sense of renunciation, the position of being your wife for so many years.

Schlegel was not her lover, though she loved him, and she was more intimate with him than I thought at first ... and, listen, she loved him with unlimited abandon, because he did not possess a husband’s rights to lord it over her, and did not assume them. This she was unconscious of. But there existed a ... a difference between her feelings for you and for him. He personified all that she had dreamed in her childish years of “Love,” and continued to personify it till her last hour.

Once she loved you thus, too, and would have gone on loving you in the same way if you had not desecrated her without awakening the woman within her.

Lili was the Sleeping Beauty who slumbered eternally. No knight ever roused her from her sleep. But you, the man to whom she presented her life’s happiness, called her harlot-natured!

Her last days were given up to a despairing desire for death and pardon for the sin which she had never committed.

The Lili who came over here was so changed that I hardly knew her. My first thought as she touched me and uttered my name was, “Who is to blame for this?” It was not only a broken-hearted woman, but a detested and ill-treated human creature who flew from the pursuit of her persecutors to die, deserted, in a foreign land.

The Lili I once knew used to come into a room as the sunshine penetrates a wood, like joy itself. Every one could see through her radiant exterior right into the floor of her pure, white soul.

But the Lili who came over here trembled in every limb and dared not meet the eyes of anybody. Schlegel lies in his grave. When he lived I regarded him as indifferently as I should any stranger. Now my thoughts go out to him full of thankfulness.

And Lili came home to you and ate the bread of humiliation for four long years in your house, while people admired you because you had pardoned her so magnanimously. Your abominable children looked down on their mother and behaved to her as to one not responsible for her actions. Dancing went on in your house, Professor Rothe, and Lili sat upstairs alone in her room. Betrothal festivities were celebrated by your family, while the mistress of the house was said to be ill, so that her pale, grief-stricken face should not cast a shadow on the festive scene.

I did the little I could, all that was in my power to win back the old, dear Lili, but it was too late. One cannot say that her mind was under a cloud, but she brooded day and night over a problem which she could not solve. Mostly she sat looking down on her hands, which were never still. Sometimes she talked of the children. She had once overheard Edmée say to one of the maids, it would be much better if mother were sent to an institution. Those words she could never forget.

Professor Rothe! Time after time unhappy women have come to you to be consoled, and helped by your explaining to them that the dangerous years of transition may affect the brain of even the steadiest and most normal of women.

You could treat others with consideration and give them shrewd and kind advice. But for Lili’s dangerous period you did not concern yourself. You allowed fate to shatter her beautiful existence. You never stretched out a hand to protect her. For Lili’s sake I cannot help hoping that there is a resurrection after death, a place “where nothing is dishonoured, where all is love.” To such a place Lili belongs. I have chosen a grave for her, looking south, where flowers will flourish, and have done it in my name.

To-morrow, I shall send you the necessary business details—a death certificate referring to heart disease—even if I have to write it myself.

I have opened the window. The river is as blue as it used to be at home in light nights. Here it is the moon that makes it blue. If only I had the power I would lay Lili in a boat and let her drift out to sea.

Elsie Lindtner.