"I have left him for good."
"So," Madame von Marwitz repeated.
With all the veils and fluctuations, one thing was growing clear to Karen. Tante might be glad to have her back; but she was confused, trying to think swiftly, to adjust her thoughts. They were in Karen's little room overlooking the trees at the corner of the house. It was dismantled; a bare dressing-table, the ewer upturned in the basin, the bed and its piled bedding covered with a sheet. Madame von Marwitz sat down on the bed and drew Karen beside her.
"But is not that to punish him too much?"
"It is not to punish him. I cannot live with him any longer."
"I see; I see;" said Madame von Marwitz, with a certain briskness, as though, still, to give herself time to think. "It might have been wiser to wait—to wait for a little. I would have written to you. We could have consulted. It is serious, you know, my Karen, very serious, to leave one's husband. I went away so that this should not come to you."
"I could not wait. I could not stay with him any longer," said Karen heavily.
"There is more, you mean. You had words? He hates me more than you thought?"
Karen paused, and then assented: "Yes; more than I thought."
Above the girl's head, which she held pressed down on her shoulder, Madame von Marwitz pondered for some moments. "Alas!" she then uttered in a deep voice. And, Karen saying nothing, she repeated on a yet more melancholy note: "Alas!"