“I met them in Paris a month ago.”
“You did? And they are still living together?”
“Most wretchedly. I cannot understand a man choosing degradation and misery because the particular happiness he sets his heart on is beyond his grasp. Women! Yes. If they can’t have the best, they plunge themselves into the worst. They are in extremes of goodness and badness, and scorn half-measures. I daresay poor young Ehrenstein finds a woman’s satisfaction in contrasting his present with the future that might have been.”
“Quite a boy! Miserable, you say. Did you speak to him?”
“No. He was with Mademoiselle Natzelhuber. I would have stopped, but he glowered on me so forbiddingly that perforce I had to pass on in silence and without bowing. Doubtless he read commiseration in my glance, and resented it. They had been quarrelling, and each seemed an unloved burden to the other.”
“And you heard nothing?”
“I met Mademoiselle Natzelhuber afterwards in a fashionable salon. She had been drawn out of her tub, by what means I know not, and with Diogenes’ contempt, consented to play. The soul of despair and unrest was in her fingers. It was the saddest music I ever heard. I spoke to her of Rudolph, and she implored me to take him off her hands. She said he bored her, and the sight of him filled her with inexplicable anger. I got their address, and when I called, she received me, and threatened to tear me to pieces if I sought to interfere between them. As I walked away, I glanced up at the window, and saw Ehrenstein looking down listlessly upon me. His face was the face of a lost soul.”
Gustav’s voice dropped to a whisper. Constantine sat thrumming the table with his fingers, and jerked his head up and down disconsolately.
“It is an awful story,” he said.
“It has burnt a hateful picture on my mind. I remember the day I first saw that boy on the Acropolis—a mere innocent, unhappy boy. Now he drowns his misery in brandy and shuns his equals. I heard at a club that he plays heavily and is steeped in vice.”