And she had said to him, ‘All the world sees that your experiment has not succeeded!’
The words added the one drop of mortification and of bitterness which was alone wanting in the cup which he had of his own weakness and of his own will filled for himself, and was forced by the justice of fate to drink.
She herself drove homeward alone through the chilly shadows of the dawn, which could not touch her, wrapped in her eider-down lined satins, and reclining amongst her yielding cushions. A beggar woman sitting on a doorstep with a sick child sleepless in her arms, saw the carriage pass, and thought, ‘What must it feel like to roll on like that, clad like that, warm and happy like that, with the price of a million loaves of bread in one single stone at your throat?’
Nadine Napraxine would have told her that food and warmth and jewels were no especial pleasure, when you had been always used to them; perhaps the absence of them might be painful—so much she would have granted.
She drove homeward, and went up to her white dressing-room with a vague sense of impatience and of regret stirring within her.
How he loved her, how he loved her, although he had been madman enough to give his life to another in an insane attempt to attain oblivion!
She did not lie down, but when her women had undressed her and wrapped her in her loose warm wrappers, she sat long looking dreamily into the fire burning on the open hearth, for the night of April was chilly within doors though without nightingales began to sing amidst the lilac buds. He would still, if she chose, go far away from all duty, all honour, all the ways of the world and the respect of men. Almost it tempted her, that which she had rejected two years before. There was another life to be hurt now! Friederich Othmar had perchance read her temperament aright when he had thought that the power to make misery would have greater force to attract her than the power to confer happiness.
‘I suppose I must be what the good dullards call wicked,’ she thought with a smile at herself, and a certain vague emotion of disgust at her own impulse.