“It appears among nations at the epoch of their highest development, and is the harbinger of their speedy decline,” remarked Czolhanski, with solemn dignity.
“What does it matter? Après nous le déluge!”
“And to what class would you assign conjugal love?” asked Owinski. Gina, who had silently disposed her lithe, snake-like, supple figure on a little sofa, looked round with astonishment at her fiancé.
“Oh, we may call it love of a third type,” answered Madame Wildenhoff: “love sanctioned by law, the union of two souls in friendship, and the bringing forth of rachitic offspring: an abnormal combination of brute and human love.”
“Do you then, Madame,” urged Owinski, “perceive no good points in marriage?”
“None whatever,” she replied with a bland smile, “because—and this reason alone would suffice me—because I hate marriage with all my heart. It has been and is the aim of my life to blast marriage, whenever I can succeed in doing so. Between the happiest and most moral couples—those in which one of the two, the husband or the wife, leads a profligate life, and the other knows nothing of it—I bring the dissolving element, enlightenment, and rejoice when I see the couples fall apart.”
Here she bent aside toward her husband’s chair, and said to him in an affectionate and audible whisper:
“But we are a pattern couple, are we not?”
This time, Imszanski went home with me. I overheard Czolhanski say, on taking leave of him: “You may rely upon me absolutely; I will manage everything.”
It has been terribly cold, and now there is a thaw. At such times, I love to wander up and down the avenues in the park, which then are completely deserted.