Freyer again burst into the bitter laugh from which she always shrank. "Pleased, when I see that you show yourself to others so--"
"How?" she asked, still failing to understand him.
"So naked!" he burst forth, unable to control himself longer. "You have uncovered your beauty thus before the eyes of the gentlemen of your world? And this is my wife--a creature so destitute of all shame?"
"Freyer!" shrieked the countess, tottering backward with her hand pressed upon her brow as if she had just received a blow on the head: "This to me--to-day!"
"To-day or to-morrow. On any day when you display the beauty at which I scarcely dare to glance, to the profane eyes of a motley throng of strangers, who gaze with the same satisfaction at the booths of a fair--on any day when you expose to greedy looks the bosom which conceals the heart that should be mine--on any such day you are unworthy the love of any honest man."
A low cry of indignation answered him, then all was still. At last Madeleine von Wildenau's lips murmured with a violent effort: "This is the last!"
Freyer was striving to calm himself. He pressed his burning brow against the frosty window-panes with their glittering tangle of crystal flowers and stars. The sparkling firmament above gazed down in its eternal clearness upon the poor earthling, who in his childlike way was offering a sacrifice to the chaste God, whose cold home it was.
"Whenever I come--there is always some new torture for me--but you have never so insulted and outraged me as today," said the countess slowly, in a low tone, as if weighing every word. Her manner was terribly calm and cold.
"I understand that it may be strange to you to see a lady in full dress--you have never moved in a circle where this is a matter of course and no one thinks of it. To the pure all things are pure, and he who is not stands with us under the law of the etiquette of our society. Our village lasses must muffle themselves to the throat, for what could protect them from the coarse jests and rudeness of the village lads?"
Freyer winced, he felt the lash.