“No; I was thinking of Martha.”
His bantering humour left him at once.
“Oh! for once in our lives surely we might learn to think only of ourselves,” he said, and his tone showed that he was vexed with me.
“And have you found that lesson so very hard to learn?”
“That’s unkind of you,” he whispered, and closed my mouth with a kiss....
“And now I have no more love left, not even for my husband. Not that I love another, not that Witold has made me suffer torments beyond endurance. No: I am merely unable to feel anything else in the world save pain. The very thought of him is a torture.”
As she spoke, I bowed my head very low.
“It may be that there is some world in which Kant’s ‘categories’ do not hold, where we are out of Space, out of Time. I believe it is so. Sometimes space does not exist for me: I have the power to see all those he has loved with him in one place. There are moments, too, when time does not exist for me: I can see them all together in one instant—both those that have been and those that are to be; yes, those that are to be, Janka.”
From under her brows she threw me a questioning glance, and went on:
“But I can see, I can fancy nothing, save under the mental form of Pain. Yes, and I have thus discovered a new ‘category’!”