And then he was gone.
Hedvig went to bed, though it was still daylight. She was accustomed to go to bed immediately after his visits. She longed to lie motionless on her back and think.
Hedvig undressed slowly and carefully. She still felt her nerves trembling. For a moment she stood naked before the big mirror built into the wall. Her body was wonderfully well preserved. In its pale, even whiteness, its slim roundness, it seemed to her wonderfully young, immensely younger than she herself. And still it made her shudder. It might betray her to love, at any moment it might betray her to love.... And some day it would relentlessly deliver her to death. Yes, Hedvig belonged to those in whom nakedness always awakens thoughts of death. If she had lived some hundred years earlier her fear would have driven her to self-torture. Then she would have scourged and martyred her body in order to blunt the point of death.
She quickly drew the blinds and crept beneath the bedcover. She slept in Percy’s old bedroom, that solemn debauch in the architecture of the ’nineties which had once aroused her frightened amusement when she came there as a nurse. The bed still resembled a gigantic catafalque, in the vault of the alcove, the zodiacal signs gleamed and in the twilight on the opposite wall the blood dripped from Saint Sebastian’s naked sides....
Hedvig knew that she had a long sleepless night in front of her. With her eyes half-closed and her hands stretched by her sides, she went slowly and carefully through all that had passed between her and Levy. In the silence she weighed his gestures, his looks, his tones and his actions. There was something in them that she revelled in, slowly sipping, drop by drop, like a frightened drinker. It was a lonely, selfish joy, separated from the world by walls of darkness and silence.
But by and by she grew more restless, sighed, and turned over beneath the bedclothes. She felt that she was approaching a thought that always recurred with terrible regularity during her nightly meditations. Levy was her lawyer? Why did he not charge her anything? She had asked once long ago what she owed for the winding-up, but she had received an evasive answer. Since then they had not discussed that point. Did he not want to accept anything? He might have asked for a very large sum. She could not help enjoying the thought of having perhaps escaped it. But then came the frightened after-thought: Why does he not want anything? Of course because it imposes an obligation, because he wants you to become his. He may ask you to be his wife any day.
Levy was no longer a harmless, gently stimulating, caressing shadow. He stood there by the side of her bed terribly alive and with pale face and harsh, passionate voice, hotly demanding his rights. And behind him roared the whole traffic of the vast opening world. She had to answer yes or no. She knew she could not escape that moment. Yes or no. Torn between jubilation and agony she writhed in the darkness. She could not quite set aside her passion. Her egoism trembled to the very roots. She dreamt frightened dreams of being permitted at last to bare herself, give herself up, be freed from herself, to fling all her misery into the flames of love.
But in the midst of her excitement she suddenly became cold as ice. Horribly clear a voice sounded inside her: “Supposing he only wants your money!”
Then suspicion, and anxious greed rushed over her with a thousand reasons. She tormented herself systematically with her sister’s and brothers’ shrugs of shoulders, sarcasms and covert warnings. Levy’s sharpness, his genius for business, his legal acumen, all that she had profited by in him seemed now to bear witness against him. “Yes, it is my money he wants,” she mumbled, “of course it is my money.” And now she forgot his looks, his accents and the unsteadiness of his voice. And the memory of her own white body in the mirror could no longer warm her with a single spark of self-confidence. No, it is my money he wants. And perhaps he does not even mean to marry me to get it. Perhaps he will simply use his position to cheat me, trick me, and rob me. He must have seen that I don’t understand business. Perhaps he is just now planning how he can take all I have from me, and ruin me.
So Hedvig passed hours of grinding agony, till, calmed by the morning light, she fell into a short sleep.