Her associates soon discovered this phenomenal peculiarity in her, and tried by a hundred devices to bring her into a condition that provided them with such rare entertainment. But she resisted with all her strength, and so she waged a perpetual warfare in which she could not count on Richard as an ally, for he liked his fair mistress to be applauded for her talent as well as admired for her beauty.
The next day she invariably felt limp and depressed, and sometimes when her mind's horizon was bounded by a red forest of high kicking legs, and the silly patter of suggestive songs rang in her head, a low voice of exhortation made itself heard within her. "Once you were different," it said. "Once you looked up to the heights and aspired to better things." But she dared not listen to this voice.... She felt she was unworthy because she was defenceless and had no one to hold out to her a protecting hand.
Sometimes, on the nights that she was free to do as she pleased, she slipped out, as if she were doing something wrong, and went to the gallery of a good theatre where she would not be known, or to the orchestra of a concert-hall where music students of both sexes congregated, sitting on steps and railings with the score on their knees, following every note.
What she saw and heard made no deep impression on her. She felt disquieted and out of her element, and fixed her attention on some young man, whose bold profile or mass of artistic curls struck her fancy.
"He is one of the gifted," she thought, with a torturing pain at her heart, and she gazed at him so long and earnestly with languishing eyes that at last he returned her glance with fiery fervour.
Yet, however hotly she might burn with eagerness to be spoken to by him, she dared not give him further signals of encouragement, with Frau Jula's awful example before her mind's eye.... And so she had to rest content with the beating of her heart, which in itself alone caused her delight.
So steeped was she now in the erotics of the world she moved in, that the slightest rise in the temperature of passion was interpreted by her as a complete drama of love and longing. Oh, the longing, that eternal gnawing toothache, to which Frau Jula had referred; how well she knew what it was now! It had come on her like a thief in the night, filling her hours of rest with a panorama of flaming visions, changing her waking hours into a drowsy trance.
She waited, and no one came. No one took the trouble to lift her lost soul out of the dust. Only one person, who watched her keenly, appeared to have any conception of what was going on within her.
This was Dr. Salmoni.
A great man was Dr. Salmoni in the estimation of those intellectual circles in Berlin of which he was a luminary. He was the editor of an art magazine once notorious for its revolutionary doctrines and the zeal with which it attacked the great gods of the old school, and set up new idols for the multitude to worship. But it was not Dr. Salmoni's way to burn incense long at any shrine; when he saw the mob kneeling before the fetishes of his own creation, he tore them down, too, and ground them under the heel of his vituperative invective. His hate was a thing to be lightly borne, his witticisms fizzled out and did not hurt, no one believed his calumnies. More dangerous was the benevolent kindness which he expended on all those whose reputation he intended to ruin. Praise from Dr. Salmoni sounded like a death-sentence in certain ears.