Oh! why bother about plans? Why not go on just as she was--loving him and making him happy? She passed her days in half-joyous, half-terrified dreams. She now had lost her zest and delight in mental exertion. There were other things that seemed more important than cultivating her intellect--the abject desire to be ever pleasing to his eyes, to hand him with unfailing regularity the intoxicating draught that held him in her toils. Hitherto she had accepted her personal charms as a matter of course, and valued them little more than anything else that was not seen and of no use. Now the cult of her body became a mania, for she so dreaded falling short of the ideal of her that she knew he had engraved on his heart. The desire to be beautiful, and the necessity of remaining beautiful, drove her to adopt methods which she had hitherto disdained. She took as much pains with herself as a woman in a harem. She perfumed her baths, tinted her nails, lengthened her eyebrows, powdered her arms and shoulders, and continually fancied she saw blemishes which needed new cosmetics to remove.
Then she was overtaken by a dread that all this care might only convert her appearance into that of a beautiful professional harlot. For this reason she left off wearing jewellery, and dressed more quietly than a parson's wife. Only the eye of a connoisseur could detect the amount of artistic ingenuity that her plain garb concealed.
Most of all when she was alone did jealousy occupy her thoughts. Not that she imagined he had anything to do with other women. He was far too noble to be suspected of that. But she was jealous of all that he did, and of all his concerns. It was torture to her to think of his writing-table. Every hour not spent in her society seemed like treachery to their love, and she cherished an hostility towards his friends such as she could never have believed herself capable of. Often, on the nights that he spent apart from her, she would keep watch on his rooms. She would stand opposite the house and look across the street and up at the windows, much as she had once done in the Alte Jakobstrasse. If the lamp was burning in his window she was content, but if she saw him going out or coming in she did not close her eyes all night.
He lived not far away, on the third floor of a Karlsbad lodging-house. It was long before he would allow her to visit him there. Next door to him, he had told her, was an invalid who needed the utmost care; any excitement caused by the sound of strange voices might prove fatal to her. When he spoke of the invalid his eyes avoided meeting hers, and she thought there were a hundred chances to one that he was keeping some secret from her.
When, however, after her persistent entreaties, he admitted her one afternoon she found nothing to confirm her suspicion. She was only besought to speak in a low tone, and she had known she must do this beforehand. His room was little more than a student's den. It was lofty, with two windows, but cheaply furnished--with no sofa and no carpet. On the walls hung rare engravings, and the usual pier-glass was displaced by a valuable copy of the "Madonna de Foligno," which looked down with sublime serenity on the barren wastes of northern Philistinism. Heaps of books were ranged on long low shelves, while others were simply piled on the floor in different corners of the room, covered with pieces of American cloth to keep them from the dust.
The writing-table alone, as might have been expected, boasted a certain luxuriousness. Like the pictures and books, it was Konrad's personal property. It stood, with its handsome carving and wide, open leaf, like a dark and solemn altar in the middle of the room. Not a single photograph of a woman was anywhere to be seen. She had not given him hers, and no other woman's was worthy of a place on his desk. Behind maps and ink-bottles was propped the portrait of an old gentleman in a frame. The face was that of a weather-beaten old gourmet, with beautiful, well-kept white hair, and eyes, peculiar to connoisseurs of women, blinking shrewdly under wrinkled drooping lids.
This was the famous old uncle who had paid for Konrad's education and now supported him.
Lilly was conscious of a profound depression of spirits as she looked at the portrait, as if one glance of those keen old eyes could read her soul and bring to light the secret that she was keeping from her lover with a thousand artifices and subterfuges.
"I'll take care that I never meet him," she thought,
Konrad took from a drawer his proudest treasure, the introduction to his great work, and showed her the closely written sheets of the manuscript.