You say, “She married me, she bore me children, she professed to love me, and all the time she had a lover behind my back. So she was of a harlot-nature!”
Professor Rothe, permit me to accompany you into your most private consulting room, the room in which you examine the most modest of your lady patients. Let me have it out with you, and inquire into your secret motives. It is possible that your modesty will be shocked, but you shall hear what I have to say on Lili’s behalf, and on those words, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
When you married her your choice was made according to the dictates of your heart, and fell on a very young girl who lived on the blue heights of idealism. She was your wife, your friend, the mother of your children, the good angel of your home. And would you dare add that she was your love also? Yes. You think that because she loved you, and you loved her, and because you took her in your arms as your wife, that she was, of course your love....
But I tell you Lili was never your love, and that she never had a lover. And the whole time you have known it perfectly well. Answer me, if you like, “There are thousands and thousands of women who, like Lili, are without feeling in this respect ... still she loved another, and so deceived me.”
Is a rose less red and fragrant, because there are thousands of other red sweet-smelling roses?
But Lili’s nature was so pure, so refined, that this deficiency as you would call it, did not exist for her. She knew what it meant, for she was not ignorant. She understood in others what she did not recognise in herself. She lived for you, her children, and her household, her own beautiful world, so essential was it for her to shed light and spread joy around her.
From this arose that wonderful harmony of her being, making of the non-waking of what was dormant within her, neither a trial nor a renunciation. If Lili had been blind she would have had the same happy nature, and would have learned the beauty of joyousness through the eyes of every seeing soul.
There never arose within her, as in the case of so many poor women, a conscious renunciation of the fire of the senses.
How infinitely she must have loved and reverenced you, to have been able to tolerate without complaint, without abhorrence and a sense of renunciation, the position of being your wife for so many years.
Schlegel was not her lover, though she loved him, and she was more intimate with him than I thought at first ... and, listen, she loved him with unlimited abandon, because he did not possess a husband’s rights to lord it over her, and did not assume them. This she was unconscious of. But there existed a ... a difference between her feelings for you and for him. He personified all that she had dreamed in her childish years of “Love,” and continued to personify it till her last hour.