"You are making your poor mother despair."
"That is true; but it is better for her to get used to despair for the time when she will lose me."
"She will die of grief."
"After me: I shall not see it, it will be all over," concluded Else von Landau gloomily. Then suddenly she began to laugh.
"Dear Doctor, you have not told me, but I know that I am doomed. Certainly I could drag on my life for years by busying myself only with my drugs, my régime, the heat of my room; by watching myself from morn till night, not speaking for fear of tiring my lungs, like Maria Goertz, who has lived two years here with a closed mouth; by fleeing from balls, festivities, theatres, engagements, only wearing the thickest furs, unable to go in décolleté or transparent dresses, unable to have either flirt or lover, forced to live summer and winter at St. Moritz Dorf or Davos, or failing that in a sanatorium. Oh, no, Doctor! I don't wish to live thus! That is no life; I prefer to end it—to end it at once."
Her large, grey, velvety eyes, with almost blue pupils, flashed with a desire of life and death, her complexion was flushed, and the little blue veins of the temples were almost swollen. A funereal beauty was in her countenance.
"Doctor, Doctor," she resumed, in a higher but rougher voice, "I don't want to exile myself, to cloister myself; I don't want to renounce anything life should give me or place within my reach. I don't want to renounce being beautiful, being loved, smiling, and becoming exhilarated with air, and sun, and love. I wish to resign nothing and prefer to live less, live a very short time, sooner than renounce things. I am thirty and a widow. I have no sons and am rich. After my death there is nothing but silence, Doctor. I don't want to renounce things."
He looked at her, recognising in her the subtle delirium of consumptives. He looked at her, so beautiful, so charming and fragile, made to live, yet so desirous of life and death, and at last his heart, after the long day of fatigue and suffering for others, so closed and granite-like, opened and welled with an immense pity for her who was invoking death, who was ready to meet it, and who was embracing it, because she would renounce nothing.
Else von Landau resumed deliriously:
"Doctor, would you renounce them? Would you renounce every good and joy and triumph, every excitement. Would you renounce them?"