Olga was strangely disturbed, she could not tell why. She blushed and looked at Karl, whom the proposition seemed to excite to strange eagerness. She did not trust herself to speak, but listened to the artist and her husband.
Neither Olga nor Karl could have defined the strange, conflicting emotions with which they separately received Herman's proposition. Unwillingly Olga's mind traveled swiftly back to the old days and her girlhood, and she recalled the day of Karl's departure, the day he took her in his arms and kissed her lips and said:
"I love you, Olga; I will not forget."
The memory thrilled her and the color flamed into her cheeks. Karl looked at her, so enraptured and absorbed that he could scarcely give attention to Herman, who rattled on about the portrait. It was finally settled that the first sitting should be the following day at Karl's studio, where Olga would be left with him alone.
It was there that Olga was then to encounter the materialization of the impulses she had been, only half unconsciously, struggling against for six years; the spirit of evil purpose against which good contends; the incarnation of the arch fiend in the attractive shape of a suave, polished, plausible, eloquent man of the world, whose cynicism bridged the years of married life; whose subtle suggestions colored afresh the faded dreams which she believed faintly remembered, and believed would come no more.
Karl left them with the promise of a sitting on the morrow.
Karl's fitful slumber was disturbed that night by vague half dreams which oppressed him when he arose. He was filled with misgiving, doubt, uncertainty. His thoughts, half formed, disturbing, were of Olga.
He tried to think of marriage with Elsa, but it was without enthusiasm. Warm, beautiful, affectionate, she made no impression on his heart, which seemed like ice.
He looked around the studio with aversion.
The pictures on the walls seemed no longer to represent the aspiration of the artist; they were mementos of the models who had posed and flirted and talked scandal within his walls.