“But we will not lose our illusions, precious. What should come between us? Are we not irrevocably bound to each other by the very act of marriage?”
“No,” Clara said decidedly and with emotion. “We are only bound by those very illusions. The divine spirit of Love makes and justifies marriage. The body is nothing to me, when the soul is gone. You are a very elegant man, Albert—elegant and beautiful in all eyes, but in mine you are beauty and strength and tenderness in one. You are everything to me; but your dear eyes, your lips, your eloquent tongue, would lose all their charm, with the loss of the soul of all.”
“Why, child, you are trembling like a leaf. Are you quite well?”
“Albert, why did she look flushed?” and she looked appealingly, searchingly into his eyes.
“I—I believe you are jealous after all,” he said.
Clara turned slowly and left the room without a word.
“Jealous, by Jove!” he said to himself when she was gone, and the idea flattered his vanity as it would that of the commonest soul. Clara had told him she could not be jealous, as the word is generally understood. That she could only suffer; but the words meant little to him. She had spoken the exact truth. In her venture, she had staked everything, and believed, as all women do under the same circumstances, that notwithstanding the coldness and indifference of married people, visible everywhere to the most superficial observer, that it was the result of a lack of wisdom—that love in all its divine freshness, could be preserved. Albert had held the same opinion, and had often said the danger lay in the first withholding of perfect trust. “Love should be cultivated like the most tender plant,” he had said.
He mused over the matter for a half hour, and then went to Clara’s room, where he found her, not “drowned in tears,” as he had anticipated, but very calmly dressing for dinner.
“I was afraid my Clara was going to be silly,” he said, smoothing her fine hair the wrong way, as men will, for it was rolled back at the sides over a heavy twist, and, of course, his caresses endangered the elegant finish of her coiffure, which had cost Clara more effort than he knew.
“Smooth my hair back, dear,” she said. “Don’t you see the way it is brushed?” and taking his fine hand, she passed it over her hair in the right way.