“How can I? I don’t know,” was his answer, as he ardently kissed my inquisitorial eyes.
“Janka, is not this the best answer of all?”
He is always like that. My looks set us apart, his kisses unite us together.
But I am wrestling, held in the grip of my love, as a kite that soars above the clouds wrestles with the string held by a boy at play!
Idalia is not averse to having company at her lodgings, where I have met several characters in the artistic world.
Wiazewski cannot hear “Bohemianism.” Yet in spite of this he not unwillingly comes, too, to see us, and to “observe.”
“Look well at all those men,” he says. “For the most part ill-shaped, ill-favoured, sitting in corners and smoking cigarettes, and paying no attention whether ladies are present or not. All of them sceptical and pessimistic, taking no interest in any but exaggerated views, and in most deadly earnest about all their convictions. That is the type of men I most abhor. If intelligent, they grow narrow-minded; and, if dull, utterly impossible in society. You have surely noticed that the greatest fool, so long as he has no convictions of his own, may be a very nice gentlemanly fellow.”
“And what about the women?”
“They are less unendurable. They don’t talk of feminism, they don’t approve of women’s emancipation, and (best of all) they practise it very effectively indeed. They have a great deal of intuition, but for all that—and luckily so—not a grain of conscious experience.”
“Whom do you like best of all?”