'It is only Wanda's jealousy,' she thought, and was furious; but she looked at herself in the mirror, and was almost consoled as she thought also, 'He avoids me. Therefore he is afraid of me!'
She went to her god, le monde, and worshipped at all its shrines and in all its fashions; but in the midst of the turmoil and the triumphs, the worries and the intoxications of her life, she did not lose her hold on her purpose, nor forget that he had slighted her. His beautiful face, serene and scornful, was always before her. He might have been at her feet, and he chose to dwell beside his wife under those solitary forests, amongst those solitary mountains of the High Tauern!
'With a woman he has lived with all these eight years!' she thought, with furious impatience. 'With a woman who has grafted the Lady of La Garaye on Libussa, who never gives him a moment's jealousy, who is as flawless as an ivory statue or a marble throne, who suckles her children and could spin their clothes if she wanted, who never cares to go outside the hills of her own home——the Teuton Hausfrau to her finger-tips.' And she was all the more bitter and the more angered because, always as she tried to think thus, the image of Wanda rose up before her, as she had seen her so often at Vienna or Hohenszalras, with the great pearls on her hair and on her breast.
A planet at whose passing, lo!
All lesser stars recede, and night
Grows clear as day thus lighted up
By all her loveliness, which burns
With pure white flame of chastity;
And fires of fair thought....
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
CONTENTS
[CHAPTER XI.]
[CHAPTER XII.]
[CHAPTER XIII.]
[CHAPTER XIV.]
[CHAPTER XV.]
[CHAPTER XVI.]
[CHAPTER XVII.]
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
[CHAPTER XIX.]
[CHAPTER XX.]
[CHAPTER XXI.]
[CHAPTER XXII.]
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
[CHAPTER XXV.]
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]