He took up his profession again; she would not hear of his resigning from the army for her sake. When he proposed it she clasped her arm tenderly about his neck and said, "Inactivity would ill become you, and I want to be proud indeed of my husband. I have but one duty now in life, to make you happy," she gently added.
He was fairly dizzy with bliss. Was it possible, he sometimes asked himself, that an angel had actually descended from heaven to nestle in his heart and to conjure up for him a Paradise on earth? Her caresses gained in value from the fact that she was not so softly docile as other women, that now and then he had to overcome in her a certain acerbity and harshness.
"A woman and a horse must both be possessed of amiable possibilities of obstinacy, or we take no pleasure in them," he declared.
She bloomed afresh after her marriage. Her features, which were rather marked, grew softer, and had the freshness of those of a girl of eighteen. Her hair, which at his request she allowed to grow, curled in soft rings about her brow. Every one noticed how very beautiful she had grown; and he too, they said, had gained much since his marriage. His moral and intellectual stand-point was loftier. She refused to have an interest which he did not share; she expended an immense amount of acuteness in discovering what would arrest his attention in whatever she was reading, and either repeated it to him or read it aloud.
The idea of playing the love-sick girl at her age was odious to her,--ridiculous; she wished to be his friend, his trusty comrade; but withal she spoiled him by a thousand delicate attentions far more than the youngest wife would have done. She exhausted her ingenuity in rendering his life delightful. She was not fond of going much into society; therefore she made his home attractive to his comrades. The entire regiment adored her, from the colonel to the youngest ensign. The women alone hated her. It was intolerable, they thought, that a blue-stocking should presume to eclipse them with the other sex.
What became of all this bliss? It vanished little by little, as the snow slowly subsides, filtering into the ground.
"I know myself," she had said to him when he wooed her; "I know myself: my paralyzing weakness will pass away, as will your intoxication."
But his intoxication, after all, lasted longer than her weakness.
After they had been married about five years, their second daughter, Estella, was born. The mother's health was terribly undermined for a while. Franz surrounded her with the most loving care, but she no longer took any pleasure in it. The fitful, unnatural glow kindled so late in her heart slowly died away; her illusions faded, her passion cooled. Nothing was left of the young spring deity of her imagination who had roused her heart from its cold wintry sleep, save a good-humoured, ordinary man whose society offered her no attraction and whose tenderness wearied her.