She pushed back her chair and stood up. She was not able to say at once what she wished, but took a step towards him and sat down again and felt quite powerless.
Then there was something in his glance that helped her. And she drew herself up and looked him firmly in the face:
“It means that you are sitting here and growing musty in old books and old stuff and nonsense, while life is taking its course around you. In time, your beard will grow fast to the table and you will never speak a word, except once every ten years, and then it will be so wise and deep that no one will understand it.”
“There is no danger of that, Adelheid,” he said.
“But I don’t want to be Queen Thyre or Signe or any of them,” she said; and her voice was so hard that something gave a wrench inside him. “I want to be the woman I am, the woman you fell in love with and took in your arms. I am not in a book. They will never read about me in the girls’ schools. I have no time to spare for this endless old drab affection beyond the grave. I don’t understand it, I don’t believe in it. I want the wild, red love....”
Cordt had turned his face from her, while she was speaking. Now he looked at her again:
“Haven’t you got it, Adelheid?”
She lay back in her chair and gave him a strange look. He had never seen those eyes before. Veil after veil fell over them, till they were quite dark, and then there suddenly lighted in them a gleam that was gone at the same moment and the veils fell again.
“I do not know,” she said.
She said it so softly that he could only just hear. He listened a moment whether she would say any more.