Once she loved you thus, too, and would have gone on loving you in the same way if you had not desecrated her without awakening the woman within her.
Lili was the Sleeping Beauty who slumbered eternally. No knight ever roused her from her sleep. But you, the man to whom she presented her life’s happiness, called her harlot-natured!
Her last days were given up to a despairing desire for death and pardon for the sin which she had never committed.
The Lili who came over here was so changed that I hardly knew her. My first thought as she touched me and uttered my name was, “Who is to blame for this?” It was not only a broken-hearted woman, but a detested and ill-treated human creature who flew from the pursuit of her persecutors to die, deserted, in a foreign land.
The Lili I once knew used to come into a room as the sunshine penetrates a wood, like joy itself. Every one could see through her radiant exterior right into the floor of her pure, white soul.
But the Lili who came over here trembled in every limb and dared not meet the eyes of anybody. Schlegel lies in his grave. When he lived I regarded him as indifferently as I should any stranger. Now my thoughts go out to him full of thankfulness.
And Lili came home to you and ate the bread of humiliation for four long years in your house, while people admired you because you had pardoned her so magnanimously. Your abominable children looked down on their mother and behaved to her as to one not responsible for her actions. Dancing went on in your house, Professor Rothe, and Lili sat upstairs alone in her room. Betrothal festivities were celebrated by your family, while the mistress of the house was said to be ill, so that her pale, grief-stricken face should not cast a shadow on the festive scene.
I did the little I could, all that was in my power to win back the old, dear Lili, but it was too late. One cannot say that her mind was under a cloud, but she brooded day and night over a problem which she could not solve. Mostly she sat looking down on her hands, which were never still. Sometimes she talked of the children. She had once overheard Edmée say to one of the maids, it would be much better if mother were sent to an institution. Those words she could never forget.
Professor Rothe! Time after time unhappy women have come to you to be consoled, and helped by your explaining to them that the dangerous years of transition may affect the brain of even the steadiest and most normal of women.