'How like a man!' she thought. 'How exactly like a man—to have killed a woman with his indifference and never to have perceived that he killed her, and then suddenly, six or seven years afterwards, to become alive to it as a fact, and then to suffer indescribable tortures! A woman would have known at once, but probably would never have blamed herself for it. We have so much more intuition and so much less conscience.'
She was sorry for the pain she saw in him, but she was impatient at once of his slowness of perception and of the strength of his tardy emotions.
'Will she be like Banquo's Ghost between us?' she thought, with a vague jealousy of those memories suddenly arisen.
'My dear Otho,' she said aloud, with a little disdain in her sympathy, 'I understand all that you feel, because this cruel fancy has presented itself quite suddenly to you. But I do not think that you ought to dwell on it, since you can know nothing for certain. You have been always too much in love with imaginary sorrows; you have always been too apt to make for yourself calamities which destiny was willing to spare you. Do not make such a mistake now. Be man enough to face the truth as it stands, which is, that had that poor child lived, she would have grown more and more intolerable to you with every breath she drew. Men enjoy sophisms, and they hate looking at their own motives in all their nakedness. If she had lived you would have made her utterly miserable, through no fault either of yours or hers, but simply from the fault of marriage, which yokes two uncongenial lives together, and refuses to release them for mental and moral disparities which inflict a million times more misery than do the mere gross offences for which the law does grant release.'
'I have no doubt you are quite right, but I cannot follow your reasoning,' said Othmar with some bitterness. 'I can only feel that I have slain a better life than my own.'
'You were always so exaggerated in your expressions,' she said with the tone which he himself had so seldom heard from her. 'You have always, as I say, been like the German poets of the last century, perpetually in love with sorrow; I suppose because you can fashion her at your pleasure. Those to whom she comes uninvited dislike the look of her, and would shut her out if they could.'
Othmar rose impatient and wounded.
'I should have hoped you would have had more sympathy,' he said as he left the room.
She gave a little gesture of wrath as the door closed behind him.
'Do men ever know what they wish?' she said to herself. 'If he could bring that poor child to life again he would do it, for the moment, and spend the remainder of his life in repenting that he had ever done so. If the powers of men were equal in force to the momentary flashes of their consciences, what strange things the world would see!'