They sat down on a bench.
"Are you feeling better?" he asked. "You were so queer in the ball-room."
"Yes, I'm better."
"Don't you think it's fun to meet your old husband again?"
"Rudolph, I don't understand how you can talk to me like that and persecute me and tease me ... after everything that has happened...."
"Oh, well, all that has happened and is done with!"
"Do you think it's discreet on your part ... or delicate?"
"No, neither discreet nor delicate. Those, you know, are things I've never been: you used to fling that in my face often enough, in the old days. But, if it's not delicate, it's amusing. Have you lost your sense of humour? It's damn jolly humorous, our meeting here.... And now listen to me. You and I are divorced. All right. That's so in the eyes of the law. But a legal divorce is a matter of law and form, for the benefit of society. As regards money affairs and so on. We've been too much husband and wife not to feel something for each other at a later meeting, such as this. Yes, yes, I know what you want to say. It's simply untrue. You have been too much in love with me and I with you for everything between us to be dead. I remember everything still. And you must do the same. Do you remember when...?"
He laughed, pushed nearer to her and whispered close to her ear. She felt his breath thrilling her on her flesh like a warm breeze. She flushed crimson with nervous distress. And she felt with her whole body that he had been her husband and that he had entered into her very blood. His voice ran like molten bronze along her nerves of hearing, deep down within her. She knew him, through and through. She knew his eyes, his mouth. She knew his broad, well-kept hands, with the large round nails and the dark signetring, as they lay on his knees, which showed square and powerful under the crease in his dress-trousers. And she felt, like a sudden despair, that she knew and felt him in her whole body. However rough he might have been to her in the old days, however much he had ill-treated her, striking her with his clenched fist, banging her against the wall ... she had been his wife. She, a virgin, had become his wife, had been initiated into womanhood by him. And she felt that he had branded her as his own, she felt it in her blood and in the marrow of her bones. She confessed to herself that she had never forgotten him. During the first lonely days in Rome, she had longed for his kisses, she had thought of him, had conjured up his virile image before her mind, had persuaded herself to believe that, by exercising tact and patience and a little management, she could have remained his wife....
Then the great happiness had come, the gentle happiness of perfect harmony!...