She soon learned how far she could go, and whenever he became restive, she yielded.
He was seized with a fanatical longing to make her a mother. He thought it might make a woman of her, bring out all that was good and wholesome in her. But the future seemed to hold no promise on that score.
Had ambition, the selfish passion of the individual, destroyed the source of life? He wondered....
One morning she informed him that she was going away for a few days to stay with her friends.
When he came home on the evening of the day of her departure and found the house empty, his soul was tormented by a cruel feeling of loss and longing. All of a sudden it became clear to him that he loved her with every fibre of his being. The house seemed desolate; it was just as if a funeral had taken place. When dinner was served he stared at her vacant chair and hardly touched his food.
After supper he lit the chandelier in the drawing-room. He sat down in her corner of the sofa. He fingered her needlework which she had left behind—it was a tiny jacket for a stranger’s baby in a newly-founded crèche. There was the needle, still sticking in the calico, just as she had left it. He pricked his finger with it as if to find solace in the ecstasy of pain.
Presently he lighted a candle and went into her bedroom. As he stood on the threshold, he shaded the flame with his hand and looked round like a man who is about to commit a crime. The room did not betray the slightest trace of femininity. A narrow bed without curtains; a writing-table, bookshelves, a smaller table by the side of her bed, a sofa. Just like his own room. There was no dressing-table, but a little mirror hung on the wall.
Her dress was hanging on a nail. The lines of her body were clearly defined on the thick, heavy serge. He caressed the material and hid his face in the lace which trimmed the neck; he put his arm round the waist, but the dress collapsed like a phantom. “They say the soul is a spirit,” he mused, “but then, it ought to be a tangible spirit, at least.” He approached the bed as if he expected to see an apparition. He touched everything, took everything in his hand.
At last, as if he were looking for something, something which should help him to solve the problem, he began to tug at the handles which ornamented the drawers of her writing-table; all the drawers were locked. As if by accident he opened the drawer of the little table by her bedside, and hastily closed it again, but not before he had read the title on the paper-cover of a small book and caught sight of a few strange-looking objects, the purpose of which he could guess.
That was it then! Facultative Sterility! What was intended for a remedy for the lower classes, who have been robbed of the means of existence, had become an instrument in the service of selfishness, the last consequence of idealism. Were the upper classes so degenerate that they refused to reproduce their species, or were they morally corrupt? They must be both, for they considered it immoral to bring illegitimate children into the world, and degrading to bear children in wedlock.