For all this, she must of course be free and get rid of Richard. She thought a great deal about him, too; invariably without bitterness or resentment. Long ago he had been forgiven for setting her feet on the downward path.
"Everyone has his own standard of right," Konrad was wont to say. And, after all, to Richard she once owed her salvation.
The new life was to begin publicly as well as privately, with his engagement, which he wrote was on the eve of taking place. But she still felt hardly equal to a crisis. She shuddered at the thought of all the lies that would have to be told to Konrad as soon as a change took place in her household.
She preferred to avoid as long as possible the inevitable hardships lying before her in the future. Only at night, when she lay on the sleeping man's breast, did she work herself up into an ecstasy of sufficient rapture to look forward to poverty and privations shared with him as a royal inheritance of purple and gold. At three o'clock in the morning, when the lamps outside were extinguished one by one, and the reflection of the first grey shadows of cold dawn lay on the ceiling, she was bound in honour to wake him.
He must not meet other residents in the house on account of his own reputation and hers.
As he dressed, he fumbled, half-asleep, among the ivory coroneted brushes, and managed to complete a hasty toilette in time to reach the nearest Viennese café as soon as it opened for a pick-me-up in the shape of a black coffee.
For from Lilly's arms he insisted on going straight to his desk. She could not talk him out of this insane proceeding. It was an atonement that the night's pleasure demanded from him, and so he would sit brooding among his books and papers till noon, often unable to write a line from fatigue.
She, on the other hand, sank into a profound slumber, from which she was awakened about ten o'clock by the entry of Adele, smiling approvingly, with the breakfast-tray.
Every other night she allowed him to devote to his work. She had no desire to sap his young life's blood. He made her anxious enough as it was. She did not like his hectic colour, nor the glitter in his eye. It disquieted her to see the abrupt changes in his mood from uproarious gaiety to absent-minded self-absorption.
All this should be altered when--what?