"He gave a house party for me in his ancestral castle on the Rhine. And he proposed to me in an ancient chapel with the moonlight making the effigies of his old ancestors seem like living knights in golden armor.
"It was all so picturesque that practical America—that you, oh, I must confess it, Anthony,—seemed miles away. It seemed to me that in my own country we lived dreary lives in a workaday atmosphere. It was only in that castle on the Rhine that there were people who knew how to play. So I became engaged, and through all those months, Van Rosen and I played together.
"But I grew so tired of it, so deadly tired of it! Life seemed to have no meaning. And after a time I grew a little afraid. Van Rosen was different. I can't define exactly where the difference lay. But between us was the barrier of centuries of opposing traditions. I began to feel that as his wife I should be a Princess in name, but a slave in fact. Always laughing, always seeming to dance in the sunshine, he had a hardness which nothing could soften. I saw him now and then with those whom he considered his inferiors. I saw his treatment of his servants, his horses, his dogs. I heard him speak once to an old and dependent aunt, at another time to a young governess—and my cheeks burned—and I was afraid.
"It came back to me then how you had always treated those who were weaker than yourself. You had always been a champion of old ladies and children. Every animal, from Peter Pan to your old fat horse—that old fat horse now is living in clover since you acquired your motor cars—adored and followed you.
"And one day I told Van Rosen—that I couldn't marry him. You don't know how humble I felt to think that I might have hurt him. But in that moment his real self showed. He was angry, furiously angry, and I knew all at once that it was my money, and not me that he wanted.
"But you had Bettina, and there was no place for me. No place for the little dark-eyed girl who had listened to the big boy on stormy nights, no place for the woman who had not known her own heart——
"And now you want me to be your friend. But I can't be your friend—Anthony. Friendship is for the man and woman who have never loved. A friendship which is the aftermath of love is the shadow after the substance. Can't you see that it is so? Can't you see that there would be just two things which might happen? If I stayed here and tried to be your friend, either I should knit myself to you by ties which should bind you to your wife, or we should drift apart, having the perfect memory neither of love nor of friendship.
"Bettina is very young, but she has depths of which you have not dreamed, of which I had not dreamed, until I talked with her last night. I went up to her room, and we had a very sweet and tender confidence. It was almost dawn before I left her. She showed me much of her heart, as she will, I hope, some day show it to you——
"Hers is a little white soul, dear friend. On the surface she has her girlish petulances, her youthful prejudices. But these? Why, I had a thousand of them, Anthony. How I snubbed those poor students whom you brought with you one afternoon to tea because their elbows were shiny and their shoes rusty. I was such a little snob, Anthony. How I should welcome them now—those great doctors, who have done so much for humanity.