I mostly spend my evenings with her, in interminable conversations. She either relates something to me, or else she “gives sorrow words.” I listen.
She is just now much grieved that her husband Witold has for nearly a fortnight hardly ever been at home. Some days we even dine without him.
“It is surely so,” she was saying yesterday. “He enjoys his manhood to the full: everything is his. There, he has ‘Bohemian’ society, revelling, fast people, singing, champagne, flowers, and forgetfulness: here, he finds the pure and quiet light of the domestic fireside, the delights of fatherhood, the love of a faithful wife. When he is tired of one sort of pleasure, why then he tries the other.... And we—we are all crippled, helpless things—all!”
Silence for a moment.
“There he gets his amusement at the expense of those poor weaklings, whose souls have been wrenched away from them, who have lost the feeling of their human dignity, the consciousness of their right to live, even the very sense of pleasure; who groan under that most unjust burden, their own self-contempt; who feel the continual oppression of a guilt which does not exist, and for whom the first wrinkle is as a sentence of death.
“But on his domestic hearth there beams another fire, and beams on another kind of weakling; a strange creature, now no longer able to descend into Life’s hurly-burly; for whom certain deeds, for many a century regarded with scorn, have through long heredity of atavistic feelings become really loathsome....
“Our duty is to amuse them—the lords of life and death—with the effects of contrast; that they may have the assurance of having experienced the whole gamut of emotions, that they may enjoy their manhood to the full.”
When Witold came home to-day from the club (which was at about noon) Martha received him in a beautiful white peignoir, trimmed with Angora fur, and asked him whether he had yet breakfasted. He thanked her graciously, kissed her hand and brow, and desired to see Orcio.
Martha changed colour. She is not so jealous, even of women, as she is of her beautiful little boy, perhaps because he is with her constantly.
The nursemaid brought Orcio, who at once jumped on to his father’s knee, and began talking at the top of his voice about a number of things which had happened to interest him since the day before.