“Madame is obeyed,” he said, bowing and putting away his cigar. The tone and manner of Clara were so strangely unlike all he knew of her, that he was astonished into good-humored admiration.
“Respect is due to me from you, and all the world, until I forfeit it by ignoble conduct. Your admiration I have thought and hoped I could never lose, for no true man or woman can really love when that is gone;” and as Clara said this, she glanced at her reflection in the glass.
“I think you are right, my dear,” he said, coldly.
“It is sad for a woman to lose what little beauty she has, for I think the admiration of most men depends wholly on personal beauty.”
“No, Clara. It is happiness that most charms the lover.”
“Then, indeed, I have no chance, for I am not happy.”
“I was fool enough to think my wife ought to be happy.”
“No; the woman you love should be happy. I am proud of being your wife, as you well know, but I would gladly change my state to that of your mistress, could I regain what I feel that I have lost forever. Oh, Albert! the world seems vanishing under my feet, when I think we have come to this.”
There was something in the whole attitude of Clara, and especially in the evidence of emotions long repressed, that filled not only the husband, but the physician, with alarm and self-reproach, and he did what all men do when unusually conscious that they are murdering by inches the women who love them. He took her in his arms, covered her with kisses, wept over her, called himself unworthy of a love so divinely tender as hers, and when in some sentence Clara alluded to Ella, he begged she would not mention the name of any other woman to him. What were all the women in the world to him? He had been a brute to even seem to put any other woman before her, or to do anything to cause her the slightest pain. Clara nestled close to his heart, and sobbed herself into a blissful state of trust and hope, as Albert went on. He would never pay any marked attention to Ella since it displeased Clara.
Clara, too happy in being restored to her husband’s confidence, answered generously, and through happy tears: