His rather large mouth smiled insincerely.
I felt he had guessed my secret. Certainly, his personality emanated a faint hostility. He turned to Luigi Papash, ... the man who has since become famous as a poet, and began to talk to him. I was dismissed....
You would be bored if I were to describe to you my feverish lover’s restlessness during the next three weeks. I did many foolish things—neglected my business, wandered about alone, and sought every opportunity to be within sight and sound of Judith. I had only to shut my eyes to see her eyes, calm and grey, her pale oval face, her dark hair. She seemed pitiful. My jealousy burned me. It was impossible for me to see her and her husband together without a horrid excitement.... But you know these things: all men feel the same about them.
I learned very little more about her. The previous year, I was told, she had had a child, a baby-boy, who had died when eight months old. She had been married three years. Her husband kept his work hidden from her. He never discussed it, never referred to it. But of their mutual idolatry there was no shadow of doubt. No two people were more essential each to the other; yet (or do I mean because?) they were entirely different.
At the end of three weeks I went back to Athens.
Madame de Stran knew my secret; oh, I suppose every one knew it. Every one except Judith who, absorbed in her husband, never exercised her intuitions with regard to myself. Madame wrote to me occasionally; she was very kind. Just news of Salonika people. And somewhere in each letter would be a sentence: “The Sterlings are still here”; or, “Professor Sterling has just published a pamphlet on ‘The Nature and Origin of Cancer': I am sending you a copy”; or, “When I told Mrs. Sterling I was writing to you, she wished me to send you her remembrances.”
Then, one morning, opening a letter of Madame de Stran’s before I touched any of my other correspondence, I read: “Professor Sterling is seriously ill. They say he has brain fever.”
He would die: I knew it. I prayed that he should. I willed it. I thought of nothing else all day. That detestable, dark man must die. Judith must be released....
“Released”? What arrogant vanity distorts the vision of all lovers! Released? Why, she was happy. Her husband’s brain was not for her a prison: it was the wide world. His enfolding arms were freedom....
That same evening I took the steamer from Le Pirée to Salonika....