He had travelled in advance of his wife, who was staying with friends at the Italian lakes, in order to prepare everything for her reception. He talked a great deal about his son, whom he could not bring to Elsa because the day was cold, and the little fellow was somewhat hoarse. All the little habits of the child, his manner of pronouncing words, he told his patiently listening sister.
His voice sounded sadder than ever when he spoke of the child, and from time to time he sighed, "Poor boy, poor boy!"
"What he must have suffered!" sobbed Elsa, when she was alone again with Erwin. "What he must have suffered!"
Yes, what he had suffered! Not even those who saw the evident traces of suffering in this thin, gray, feverish man, could imagine the greatness of his misery, could judge the darkness of his soul which his intercourse with the world had caused.
Immediately after the intoxication of the honeymoon, even during the wedding trip, which at Linda's wish they had made to Egypt, when he began to learn to know his wife, he came to the sad conviction that the most trivial acquaintance would have offered him as much distraction as this marriage. Pretty, coquettish, graceful, seductive. Linda was all these, but she had absolutely no mind. Like all narrow women without intelligence she became, after continued acquaintance, tiresome.
Incessantly occupied with the ambition to appear a true aristocrat, in whom one could not perceive the parvenue, she had no room for other thoughts. Her joy at being now a "Lanzberg" was fairly naïve. He really could not be angry with her when she displayed her little vanities to him. She wished to flatter him. He looked at her compassionately at such times and turned away his head.
From Cairo she had dragged him to Paris. There, at first, they had led an irregular, stranger life, with half-packed trunks in the Grand Hotel, went to the theatre and drove in the Bois de Boulogne. Linda for a while was satisfied with the acquaintances which she made in the hotel reading-room, at the skating-rink, etc. Felix always avoided a table a'hôte, which Linda, even if the tête-à-tête meals were at times a bore to her, never opposed, as an elegant custom.
Then she was one day accidentally asked by one of her friends whether she should attend the last soirée of the Austrian ambassador. A pang went through Linda's heart. She enveloped her denial of the simple question in a confusion of excuses and explanations--she had only recently married, she had not yet thought of paying visits. Scarcely was she alone with Felix when she asked him if he knew the ambassador.
Yes, Felix knew him, but had not seen him for years. Naturally Linda ascribed his evident objection to visiting His Excellency to the shyness which his mésalliance caused in him. A scene followed, tears, cutting remarks--headache.
The next morning, Felix stood mournfully before one of Froment-Meurice's windows and asked himself whether he should not buy his wife a diamond cluster of wheat to calm her anger, when some one seized his arm and cried, "Why, how are you, Felix?"