A coquette is like a usurer, giving very little and exacting upon it a high percentage. To-day, as I am growing more composed and can think again, I must render Aniela justice; she never encouraged me or exacted anything. What I mistook for a touch of coquetry at Warsaw was mere joyfulness of a youthful spirit that had shaken itself momentarily free from all trouble. All that has happened was brought on by me. I made mistake after mistake, and it is all my fault.
To know something, and to make it a matter of calculation are two different things. We account to ourselves for unknown factors which act upon the soul of a given individual, but in dealing with the same we generally take ourselves as a point of issue. This happened to me. I knew, or at least was conscious of the fact, that Aniela and I are as different from each other as if we were the inhabitants of two separate planets, but I did not always remember it. Involuntarily I counted upon her acting in a certain position as I should have acted.
In spite of the consciousness that we two are the most dissimilar beings under the sun, as opposite as the poles, I note it down with a certain surprise, and seem not able to get used to the thought. And yet it is true. I am a thousand times more like Laura Davis than Aniela.
And now I begin to understand why I failed.
The rock I split against is the want of that which has vanished within me, thereby freeing my thoughts, but bringing instead of it the mortal disease that has become my tragedy; it is the catechismal simplicity of the soul.
Now I can account for it clearly, perhaps not quite satisfactorily, for I am of so complex a disposition as to have lost the very instinct of simplicity. "I hear thy voice, but I see thee not." My spiritual sight suffers from Daltonian disease and cannot distinguish colors.
I cannot even understand how any one can accept a principle, however hallowed by ages, without looking at it from both sides, pulling it to pieces, into shreds and atoms, until it crumbles into dust and cannot be put together any more.
Aniela cannot understand that a principle once considered good, hallowed by religion, as well as by public opinion, could be considered otherwise than as a sacred duty.
It does not matter to me whether she is conscious of it, or it is instinctive impulse reasoned out by her intelligence, or merely acquired; it is enough that it has entered her very nature.
I had a glimpse of it the other day when I spoke about Pani Korytzka's divorce suit: "You can prove everything, and yet when one does wrong conscience tells us: 'It is wrong, it is wrong!'" I did not then attach the importance to these words that belonged to them. In Aniela there is no wavering, no doubt whatever. Her soul winnows the chaff from the grain with such precision that there can be no question about its purity. She does not try to find her own norma, but takes it ready-made from religion, general moral principles, and clings to them so strongly that they become her very own, for they permeate her system. The simpler the differential quality of good and evil, the more absolute and merciless it grows. In this ethical code there are no extenuating circumstances. As according to it the wife belongs to her husband, she who gives herself to another does wrong. There are no discussions, no considerations, or reflections,—there is the right hand for the righteous, the left for the sinners, God's mercy above all,—but nothing between, no intermediate place.