"Indeed! I should do him injustice?" Erika questioned in the same unnaturally quiet tone. "I think not. It is not my fashion to deceive myself. I know perfectly well that--that I have sunk in Goswyn's esteem; it is a very unpleasant conviction, I confess; and, to be frank, I would rather you did not mention the subject again."
"But, Erika, if you would only listen," the old Countess persisted. "He adores you. His pride alone keeps him from you: you are too wealthy; your social position is too brilliant."
Erika waved aside this explanation of affairs. "Say no more," she cried. "I know what I know! But you must not waste your pity upon me: my vanity is wounded, not my heart. I value Goswyn highly, and it troubles me that he no longer admires me as he did, but, I assure you, I have not the slightest desire to marry him. I pray you to believe this: at least it may prevent you, perhaps, from throwing me at his head a second time, without my knowledge. If you do it, I declare to you, I will reject him." As she uttered the last words, the girl's self-command forsook her, her voice had a hard metallic ring in it, and her eyes flashed angrily.
Her grandmother turned and left the room with bowed head.
Scarcely had the sound of her footsteps died away when Erika locked her door, threw herself upon her bed, buried her face in the pillows, and burst into tears.
What she had declared to her grandmother was in a measure true: she herself supposed it to be entirely true. She really had no wish to marry, and there was in her heart no trace of passionate sentiment for Goswyn, but she was bruised and sore, and she longed for the tender sympathy he had always shown her. At times she would fain have fled to him from the cold judgment and scrutiny of the world.
After she had relieved herself by tears, she understood herself more clearly. Sitting on the edge of her bed, her handkerchief crushed into a ball in her hand, she said, half aloud, "I have lied to my grandmother. If he had come I would have married him,--yes, without loving him; but it would have been wrong: no one has a right to marry such a man as Goswyn out of sheer despair because one does not know in what direction to throw away one's life. But why think of it? He does not care for me. Why, why did my grandmother write to him? I cannot bear it!"
CHAPTER XVI.
A few days afterwards the Lenzdorffs left Berlin, to spend the winter in Rome, where Erika, incited thereto by her grandmother, went into society perpetually, without taking the least pleasure in it. And she made no secret of her indifference, her discontent. The bark of her existence, once so safe and sure in its course, seemed to have lost its bearings: she saw no aim in life worthy the effort to pursue it.
She indulged in fits of causeless melancholy; yet all the while her beauty bloomed out into fuller perfection, and all unconsciously to herself life throbbed within her and demanded its right. The old Countess, who did not understand her condition, looked upon it as a morbid crisis in the girl's life; but she never dreamed how fraught with danger the crisis was.