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The time draws on. The last few days my nerves have made me feverish and restless; to-day for no special reason I opened and read all my letters, except his. It was like reading old newspapers; yet my heart beat faster with each one I opened.
Life there in the city runs its course, only it has nothing more to do with me, and before long I shall have dropped out of memory like one long dead. All these hidden fears, all this solicitude, these good wishes, preachings and forebodings—there is not a single genuine feeling among the whole of them!
Margethe Ernst is the only one of my old friends who is sincere and does not let herself be carried away by false sentiment. She writes cynically, brutally even: "An injection of morphia would have had just the same effect on you; but everyone to his own taste."
As to Lillie, with her simple, gushing nature, she tries to write lightly and cheerfully, but one divines her tears between the lines. She wishes me every happiness, and assures me she will take Malthe under her motherly wing.
"He is quiet and taciturn, but fortunately much engrossed with his plans for the new hospital which will keep him in Denmark for some years to come."
His work absorbs him; he is young enough to forget.
As to the long accounts of deaths, accidents and scandals, a year or two ago they might have stirred me in much the same way as the sight of a fire or a play. Now it amuses me quite as much to watch the smoke from my chimney, as it ascends and seems to get caught in the tops of the trees.
Richard is still travelling with his grief, and entertains me scrupulously with accounts of all the sights he sees and of his lonely sleepless nights. Are they always as lonely as he makes out?
As in the past, he bores me with his interminable descriptions and his whole middle-class outlook. Yet for many years he dominated my senses, which gives him a certain hold over me still. I cannot make up my mind to take the brutal step which would free me once and for all from him. I must let him go on believing that our life together was happy.