Burying my face in the bed-quilt, I sobbed irrepressibly. Adelaide’s apparent unconsciousness of, or callousness to, the stabs she was giving me, and the anguish they caused me, almost distracted me.
She loosed my arm, remarking, with bitter vexation:
“I feel as if I could shake you!”
She left the room. I was left to my meditations. My head—my heart too—ached distractingly; my arm was sore where Adelaide had grasped it; I felt as if she had taken my mind by the shoulders and shaken it roughly. I fastened both doors of my room, resolving that neither she nor any one else should penetrate to my presence again that night.
What was I to do? Where to turn? I began now to realize that the Res dom, which had always seemed to me so abundant for all occasions, were really Res Angusta, and that circumstances might occur in which they would be miserably inadequate.
CHAPTER IV.
“Zu Rathe gehen, und vom Rath zur That.”
Briefe Beethoven’s.