when he
tears your life by thrusting me forth from it--me--and everything I am
and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen--you have seen my efforts to win
your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his
half-hidden insolence. Never--ah, never in my life have I faced such
humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof--humiliations,
endured for your sake, Karen--for yours only! Ah"--releasing Karen
suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry,
stretching out her arm--"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find
yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my
friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting
your room! Did I not see it! You! _justes cieux!_ with your bourgeois
little world; your little--little world--so small--so small! your people
like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in
between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side
lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of
surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this
cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a
creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in
from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never!
there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her
love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not
share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart--ah,
I know it--will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod
upon and broken!"

With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz
sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate
tears.

Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of
embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile
of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's
bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.

"My dear," said Gregory--their voices seemed to pass above the clash and
uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an
elemental grief--"I have nothing to say to your guardian."

"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to
me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not
repulsed her efforts to come