Even Madame Von Bruyin seemed in better spirits as she said, cheerfully:
“We must have lights now, dear.”
She touched the silver timbre on the stand beside her.
An attendant came in and lighted the gas and retired.
Lilith arose from her low position on the hassock at the lady’s feet.
The baroness also stood up, and drawing her companion’s arm within her own, walked up and down the splendid, illuminated room in silence.
It happened that at each end of this room there was a broad and tall mirror that reached from floor to ceiling and reflected the two figures from head to foot—the grand beauty of the Baroness Von Bruyin and the petite grace of Lilith.
The young wife marked the contrast with a sinking and despairing heart. In her admiration she greatly exaggerated the power of her rival’s queenly charms, and in her humility as much underrated the effects of her own sweet loveliness.
“Ah!” she sighed, from the depths of her desponding spirit. “No wonder he worships this lady, for she is the crowned queen of beauty! No wonder he could not love me, for who am I beside her? No more than a little yellow duckling beside a royal white swan! No! I cannot blame him for adoring her and not liking me. But oh! he might have let me alone. He ought not to have married me so lightly and cast me off so easily because I was a duckling and not a swan. Now I remember that he never said he loved me. He never professed what he never felt for me. And I was so blind I never missed that. Because he asked me to be his wife, I truly thought he loved me, and I did so joyfully consent—letting him see how happy and how glad I was of the honor he had done me, the delight he had given me. Oh, the sin of it! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, my angel mother in heaven, if you had been on earth you would never have let your child fall into such a trap. You would have taught her; you would have warned her. Oh, he ought to have been generous; he ought to have remembered that I had no mother; he ought to have let me alone!”
“What is the matter with you, dear child?” inquired the baroness, breaking in upon Lilith’s grievous reverie. “You are so absorbed and distressed that you must be in some great trouble, either for yourself or for some one else. Can I do anything for you?”