“She does not believe me!” he thought … he went into the next room, however, and there found Frau Lenore.
Her sick headache had passed off, but she was in a depressed state of mind. She gave him a smile of welcome, but warned him at the same time that he would be dull with her to-day, as she was not in a mood to entertain him. He sat down beside her, and noticed that her eyelids were red and swollen.
“What is wrong, Frau Lenore? You’ve never been crying, surely?”
“Oh!” she whispered, nodding her head towards the room where her daughter was. “Don’t speak of it … aloud.”
“But what have you been crying for?”
“Ah, M’sieu Sanin, I don’t know myself what for!”
“No one has hurt your feelings?”
“Oh no!… I felt very low all of a sudden. I thought of Giovanni Battista … of my youth … Then how quickly it had all passed away. I have grown old, my friend, and I can’t reconcile myself to that anyhow. I feel I’m just the same as I was … but old age—it’s here! it is here!” Tears came into Frau Lenore’s eyes. “You look at me, I see, and wonder…. But you will get old too, my friend, and will find out how bitter it is!”
Sanin tried to comfort her, spoke of her children, in whom her own youth lived again, even attempted to scoff at her a little, declaring that she was fishing for compliments … but she quite seriously begged him to leave off, and for the first time he realised that for such a sorrow, the despondency of old age, there is no comfort or cure; one has to wait till it passes off of itself. He proposed a game of tresette, and he could have thought of nothing better. She agreed at once and seemed to get more cheerful.
Sanin played with her until dinner-time and after dinner Pantaleone too took a hand in the game. Never had his topknot hung so low over his forehead, never had his chin retreated so far into his cravat! Every movement was accompanied by such intense solemnity that as one looked at him the thought involuntarily arose, “What secret is that man guarding with such determination?” But segredezza! segredezza!