lives, simply because it was too great a blank to describe. Day after
day we felt it, and it grew keener, and the wound smarted more sharply.
One can not work all day long, and in our leisure hours we learned to
know only too well that he was gone--and gone indeed. That which
remained to us was the "Resignation," the "miserable assistant" which
poor Beethoven indicated with such a bitter smile. We took it to us as
inmate and _Hausfreund_, and made what we could of it.

CHAPTER XXVII

"So runs the world away."

Koenigsallee, No. 3, could scarcely be called a happy establishment. I
saw much of its inner life, and what I saw made me feel mortally
sad--envy, hatred, and malice; no hour of satisfaction; my sister's
bitter laughs and sneers and jibes at men and things; Sir Peter's calm
consciousness of his power, and his no less calm, crushing, unvarying
manner of wielding it--of silently and horribly making it felt.
Adelaide's very nature appeared to have changed. From a lofty
indifference to most things, to sorrow and joy, to the hopes, fears,
and feelings of others, she had become eager, earnest, passionate,
resenting ill-usage, strenuously desiring her own way, deeply angry when
she could not get it. To say that Sir Peter's influence upon her was
merely productive of a negative dislike would be ridiculous. It was
productive of an intense, active hatred, a hatred which would gladly, if
it could, have vented itself in deeds. That being impossible, it showed
itself in a haughty, unbroken indifference of demeanor which it seemed
to be Sir Peter's present aim in some way to break down, for not only
did she hate him--he hated her.

She used to the utmost what liberty she had. She was not a woman to talk
of regret for what she had done, or to own that she had miscalculated
her game. Her life was a great failure, and that failure had been
brought home to her mind in a mercilessly short space of time; but of
what use to bewail it? She was not yet conquered. The bitterness of
spirit which she carried about with her took the form of a scoffing
pessimism. A hard laugh at the things which made other people shake
their heads and uplift their hands; a ready scoff at all tenderness; a
sneer at anything which could by any stretch of imagination be called
good; a determined running up of what was hard, sordid, and worldly, and
a persistent and utter skepticism as to the existence of the reverse of
those things; such was now the