He broke off and raised his fists, so that she withdrew frightened into a corner of the lounge.
"Pray, for goodness' sake, don't get so angry again," she whispered. "I am miserable enough."
"That is to be all over now," he said.
"What, my misery?" she asked with a disconsolate smile.
Then he began with vehement zeal to describe to her what he proposed the future should be. He had a double mission in her house. First, Ulrich's happiness; secondly, her rehabilitation.
With his assistance she was to free herself from the oppressive consciousness of the old guilt, she was to learn to hold up her head again, and to get used to a sense of reconquered dignity, so that it was not to be conceived for a moment that the most impertinent dared approach her with anything less than what was due to her position.
"You paint Heaven to me," she murmured, and a tremulous radiance began to gleam in her eyes.
"I only paint what it is possible to realise," he answered. "When we open this door, Lizzie, all the old rottenness must be sloughed off. We shall begin a new life from that moment."
She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and exhaled over him a cloud of the perfume she habitually used. The discreet delicacy of the iris was overpowered by the sharp sweetness of the opoponax, so that, half-suffocated by the pungent odour of the atmosphere around her, he made for the window.
His glance wandered round the one-windowed apartment, which had once been his own putting-up quarters; it was now transformed, regardless of cost, into the luxurious nest of a fashionable woman of the world.