"Poor Stella! poor Stella!" Stasy screams from the terrace, fairly convulsed with laughter. "Delightful fellow, Rohritz: he knows what he's about!"
But Stella covers her burning face with her hands. "I will go into a convent," she says; "there at least I shall be able to conduct myself properly."
Meanwhile, Rohritz and the captain roll on towards the station. They are both silent.
"He is desperately in love with her," thinks the captain. "Is he really too poor to marry, I wonder?"
Yes, it is true Rohritz is desperately in love with her; she hovers before his eyes in all her loveliness like a vision. He would fain stretch out his arms to her, but he is perpetually tormented by the persistent question, "Whom does she resemble?" Suddenly he knows. The knowledge almost paralyzes him!
Beside the pure, fresh vision of Stella he sees leaning over a black-haired, vagabond-looking man at the roulette-table at Baden-Baden the hectic ruin of a woman who has been magnificently beautiful, a woman with painted cheeks and with deep lines about her eyes and mouth,--otherwise the very image of Stella.
Twelve years since he had seen her thus, and upon asking who she was had been told that she was the mistress of the Spanish violinist Corrèze, and that she was little by little sacrificing her entire fortune to gratify the artist's love of gaming. His informant added that she was a woman of birth and position, and that she had left her husband and child in obedience to the promptings of passion. He did not know her husband's name: she called herself then Madame Corrèze.
Why do all Stasy's malicious remarks about Stella's unpleasant connections, and about the Meineck temperament, crowd into his mind?
There is no denying that Stella is lacking in a certain kind of reserve.
While he is waiting with the captain beneath the vine-wreathed shed of the station for the train which has just been signalled, these hateful thoughts refuse to be banished. He suddenly asks his friend, who stands smoking; in silence beside him,--