ust
because a couple of her friends declared that he was making love to her
and because a serious flirtation, a passion, formed part of the game, as
it were. And then, in very elegant language, she had complained to Van
der Welcke of the void in her life and said all sorts of fine things
about soul-hunger and life-weariness, without knowing anything about
soul-hunger or life-weariness and remembering that she had to go to her
dressmaker, that afternoon, and to two receptions and that she had her
own reception in the evening. Then she parroted bits out of a French
novel, acted a scene or two after the same model, thinking it time to
bring a little literature into her life. He, a good-looking
fellow--short and well-knit, sturdy without being clumsy, with a pair of
boyish blue eyes, a shapely, round head with lightly-curling, short,
brown hair, like a head of Hermes, and still exceedingly young--thought
that it would look well for him to make a little love to his chief's
wife, without going any farther, of course.... But it was impossible for
them to play with fire unscathed, in an atmosphere like that of Rome.
They saw so many French novels acted around them that, quite
involuntarily, they began to feel not only like a modern hero and
heroine of fiction or a pair of fashionable actors, but what they were:
a young man and a young woman; she the wife of a man old enough to be
her father. What had started with a compliment and a laugh--because of
what her friends had told her--led to a warmer pressure of the hand, not
once but many times, the abandonment of a waltz, a kiss and the rest....
They both glided towards sin gradually, as though inevitably. She was at
first greatly surprised at herself and annoyed and, for the first time
in her life, felt the danger of playing with life ... especially when
she, who had never loved, fell in love with the man who had acted with
her in this drawing-room comedy and turned it to earnest. In her soul,
choked with vanity and false glamour, one genuine emotion now sprang up:
she fell in love with Van der Welcke. She did not love him for any
quality of soul or heart or temperament, but she loved him all the same,
loved him as a young woman loves a young man, with all the blind impulse
of her womanhood. Her feeling for him was primitive and simple, but it
was whole-souled and true. Until now, she had cared for nothing but Mrs.
This or Freule That, of "the set;" the ceremonial splendour of the