“Ah, bon jour, Contessina—I have a greeting to transmit to you. My cousin writes me from Paris.... He was to be here to-day himself, but—I am not surprised at it in him, he is a man of moods—instead of coming, he writes to bid me farewell for this year; he left Paris yesterday to go direct to Tiflis.”
And I—silly thing—I burst into tears.
“For God’s sake, what is the matter, Contessina?”
“Oh, Dedopali,—it is too cruel!”
“What?... that my cousin has gone home? So you are in love with him?... Perhaps it may be your fate after all,—he may come back again; don’t cry. No man deserves to have a girl cry for him if he is capable of passing by his own good luck like that. Besides, all may yet turn out as your heart desires.”
These words were a balm to me. Merely the right to hope,—that is all that youth desires. And so I hoped that Heraclius would write me from Georgia. But he did not.—
VIII
NOVITIATE IN ART
Back to Baden · Singing lessons · Great hopes · A test before Madame Viardot
However, it was not an inordinately long time before the image of the Georgian prince had grown dim in my memory. And gradually, once more, something quite new became the object of my life, the “one important thing.”
We returned to Baden greatly disappointed—my mother in her great hopes of gain, which had to be exchanged for no inconsiderable certainty of loss, and I in my exploded dream of love; and there we proposed to live very quietly and frugally in our country house, and spend the winter too in seclusion there.
We had a lodger in our house, an old music teacher, who had been an orchestra conductor. One day he asked to see us.