“Yet there must be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me nor in your surroundings, it must lie in yourself. Sometimes such depression is a symptom of ill-health. Are you sure that you are quite well?”
“At all events I feel so,” she replied gravely. “See for yourself how I eat and walk and sleep and work! Yet every now and then there comes over me a mood in which life seems to me incomplete.... Do not mind this, however. It is nothing—nothing at all.”
“Tell me more,” he urged. “Certainly life is incomplete, but what would you add to it?”
“And sometimes,” she continued, “I grow afraid lest everything should be about to be changed, or to come to an end; while at other times I find myself torturing my brain with a stupid wondering as to what more is to be expected from the future, this happiness of ours, this life, with its joys and sorrows”—she had dropped her voice to a whisper, in a sort of shame at her own questionings—“I know to be quite natural; yet something seems still to be drawing me onwards, and to be making me dissatisfied with my lot. How ashamed I feel of my folly and fancifulness! But do not notice me: this despondency of mine will soon pass away, and I shall once more become bright and cheerful.”
She pressed herself closer with a timid caress, as though she were asking pardon for what she termed her “folly.” He questioned her as to her symptoms as a physician might have done, and, in return, she described to him her dull self-interrogations, her confusion of soul. Meanwhile Schtollz paced the avenue with his head on his breast and his mind filled with doubt and anxiety—anxiety at the fact that he so little understood his wife. At length she, in her turn, drew him into the light of the moon, and gazed inquiringly into his eyes.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked bashfully. “Are you smiling at my foolishness? Yes, ’tis very foolish, this despondency of mine. Do you not think so?”
He made no reply.
“Why do you not speak?” she urged impatiently.
“You have long been keeping silence,” he replied, “although always you have known how solicitous I am on your account. Permit me, therefore, to keep silence and reflect.”
“Yet, if you do that, I shall feel uneasy. Never ought I to have spoken out. Pray say something.”