Now and then I enjoy emotions of superhuman delight, of ecstatic bewilderment. And then again there flutter about me, like black moths, certain bitter self-reproaches for the past, and maddening apprehensions as to the future,—Really, it is too ridiculous!... As if there could be anything worse than the sepulchral monotony of my life, as it formerly was!
And yet I know—I know!—that this is not happiness: that this romantic adventure of mine will have no morrow.
Put an end to it? I cannot; for just now the man is as necessary to me as the air I breathe. But some time or other I shall not love him any more; and then I shall hold it as a sacred duty to pay him for his deeds in the past by my future conduct.
And she, this my poor love! stands here, gazing with eyes full of frantic terror at her end, that will and must come some day!
The keynote in the tragedy of woman’s life is the fact that her need for permanent love stands in contradiction with men’s instincts and with their interests. Wiazewski calls this her “higher culture.” I think that Schopenhauer’s justification of this need as simply a case of design in nature is far more convincing. For how can we see any superiority in an instinct that we find equally developed in the most refined inamorata with her deep emotions, and in the average middle-class woman, all given up to passivity and routine?
After Owinski had engaged himself to a new fiancée, he would still, in the beginning, come at times and call upon Gina.
She would receive him with a smiling face and serene looks, and endeavour to delude him into thinking that no change had taken place, and that, if he said he had come back to her, she would be neither surprised nor dismayed.... She would talk about things which had interested them both; about her paintings and his poems. Together they read books, treating of the Beautiful, and Life, and Love. Once he said that he could not come to see her the next day, as his intended was to arrive in town; she took it as quietly as if he had announced his mother’s or his sister’s arrival. But, though they still called each other by their Christian names, they no longer kissed, not even at parting.
On one occasion, she asked him to read her one of his poems; a thing he was always willing to do. She listened, adapting to each changing phrase of his mind as she had used to do, and following every flash of his eye.—Now, there were many works of his with which she was not acquainted: formerly, she had been the first to read anything he wrote With a composed and tranquil mien, she listened even to the love-song, written for “the other.” Of course, they were the output of the reaction which had set in: the magic power of innocence; the first confession of love from the untouched lips of one ignorant of life; the return of his springtime, of his youth, of his ideals.... Gina had great self-control. At the end of one such poem, she handed him a love-song of the old times, written three years before, and under her enchantment. And this too he read aloud as he had read the others; and, roused to enthusiasm by the very music of the lines, showed a fire too evidently, alas! out of all connection with the object which had once inspired them.
Like a tune sunk deep in memory in bygone days, the words at once brought all the past before her: it rose up, plainly visible to her mind’s eye. The vision was agonizing, and the dismay of it made her raise her hands to her throat, as if to prevent the outburst of lamentation that now tore her bosom, as if she had been a feeble child, long and unjustly ill-treated. For she knew not how long, she wept like one distraught, even forgetting that he was present and only aware that all her universe had given way, was broken to pieces, crumbled to dust, annihilated.
Some one took her tenderly in his arms, smoothed her hair, kissed those moist, red, tear-swollen eyes of hers.