“But, Otto!” she said: “How can you?”
“Do you like the stone?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful.... But such a lot of money! For one diamond!”
And she drew her husband’s hand towards her and suffered him to kiss her on the forehead, because he had been permitted to buy her a three-hundred-guilder diamond. Doddie and Theo stood winking at each other.
[1] £50.
Chapter Four
Léonie Van Oudijck always enjoyed her siesta. She only slept for a moment, but she loved after lunch to be alone in her cool bedroom till five or half-past five. She read a little, mostly the magazines from the circulating library, but as a rule she did nothing but dream. Her dreams were vague imaginings, which rose before her as in an azure mist during her afternoons of solitude. Nobody knew of them and she kept them very secret, like a secret vice, a sin. She committed herself much more readily—to the world—where her liaisons were concerned. These never lasted long; they counted for little in her life; she never wrote letters; and the favours which she granted afforded the recipient no privileges in the daily intercourse of society. Hers was a silent, correct depravity, both physical and moral. For her imaginings too, despite their poetical insipidity, were depraved. Her pet author was Catulle Mendès: she loved all those little flowers of azure sentimentality, those rosy, affected little cupids, with one little finger in the air and their legs gracefully hovering around the most vicious themes and motives of perverted passion. In her bedroom hung a few engravings: a young woman lying on a lace-covered bed and being kissed by two sportive angels; another: a lion with an arrow through its breast at the feet of a smiling maiden; lastly, a large coloured advertisement of some scent or other: a sort of floral nymph whose veils were being drawn on either side by playful little cherubs, of the kind which we see on soap-boxes. This “picture” in particular she thought splendid; she could imagine nothing with a greater æsthetic appeal. She knew that the plate was monstrous, but she had never been able to prevail upon herself to take the horrible thing down, though it was looked at askance by everybody: her friends, her step-children, all of whom walked in and out of her room with the Indian casualness which makes no secret of the toilet. She could stare at it for minutes on end, as though bewitched; she thought it perfectly charming; and her own dreams resembled this print. She also treasured a chocolate-box with a keepsake picture on it, as the type of beauty which she admired, even above her own: the pink flush on the cheeks, the brown eyes under unconvincing golden hair, the bosom showing through the lace. But she never committed herself in respect of this absurdity, which she vaguely suspected; she never spoke of these prints and boxes, just because she knew that actually they were hideous. But she thought them lovely; for her they were delightful, were artistic and poetical.
These were her happiest hours.