“‘Your nerves are better now, I see. How glad I am! You have no idea. You have at last realized that to feel jealous of a cocotte would be unworthy of you.’
“‘Why, of course. Yes, yes; I am all right now.’ And yet, Janka, I never felt it so deeply; I never saw things with such awful clearness of vision. And alas! I never, never yet loved Witold with such passionate love.
“But, more than him, I love that pain which I feel....”
She rose in bed, as if to repel something that was weighing her down; then she sat propped up by her cushions and pillows.
“Do you imagine that in all this I had any idea of revengeful pleasure at Mme. Wildenhoff’s disappointment, and for that reason made him tell me what he did? Not in the least. I wanted to drink my fill of pain; as in Spain they wave a red flag in bull-fights before the bloodshot eyes of the poor brute, to make him yet madder with rage and despair, so I wished to excite myself to the same delirious state.
“I do not wish for anything that can diminish the intensity of my anguish, I hate whatever could mitigate or deaden it. I love to gloat over the raw bleeding wounds, bare and unbandaged....”
At that moment, the nurse tapped at the door, to ask whether Orcio might not come in to bid his mother good morning.
“No—no! shut the door! I will have no one here! Janka, you have not the least idea how I hate my son.”
At Lipka’s to-night: and this time in a private room. Mme. Wildenhoff talked at great length, somewhat to the following effect:
“There is in reality only one kind of perfect love—that of the brute creation; indeliberate, irreflective love, wherein victory is to the strongest and most beautiful; the pure reproductive instinct, unalloyed by any culture or mental analysis whatsoever. But we—we, who are civilized—unfortunately look down upon this sort of love. For we have reckoned, with quasi-mathematical exactitude, how much of love should be taken, and how much rejected, in order to get the greatest possible sum of quintessential delight. And thence has sprung quite a new type of love: instinct which has emancipated itself from obedience to the laws of nature—love with its chief motive, preservation of the species, eliminated. Now love of the kind I have spoken of generally receives the epithet of bestial; whereas on the contrary it is most specially the outcome of refinement.”