, my wild, stained
heart, Karen, my fierce and desolate and broken heart. You are air and
water; I am earth and fire; how could you understand my darkness and my
rage?" She spoke, sobbing, with a sincerity dreadful and irrefragable,
as if she stripped herself and showed a body scarred and burning. With
all the forces of her nature she threw herself on Karen's pity, tearing
from herself, with a humility far above pride and shame, the glamour
that had held Karen's heart to hers. Deep instinct guided her
spontaneity. Her glamour, now, must consist in having none; her nobility
must consist in abasement, her greatness in being piteous.

"Listen to me, Karen," she sobbed, "The world knows but one side of
me--you have known but one side;--even Tallie, who knows so much, who
understands so much--does not know the other--the dark and tortured
soul. I am not a good woman, Karen, the blood that flows in my veins is
tainted, ambiguous. I have sinned. I have been savage and dastardly; but
it has always been in a madness when I could not seize my better self:
flames seem to sweep me on. Listen, Karen, you are so strong, so calm,
how could you dream of what a woman's last wild passion can be, a woman
whose whole soul is passion? Love! it is all that I have craved. Love!
love! all my inner life has been enmeshed in it--in craving, in seeking,
in destroying. It is like a curse upon me, Karen. You will not
understand; yet that love of love, is it not so with all us wretched
women; do we not long, always, all of us, for the great flame to which
we may surrender, the flame that will appease and exalt us, annihilate
us, yet give us life in its supremacy? So I have always longed; and not
grossly; mine has never been the sensual passion; it has been beauty and
the heights of life that I have sought. And my curse has been that for
me has come no appeasement, no exaltation, but only, always, a dark
smouldering of joylessness. With my own hand I broke the great and
sacred devotion that blessed my life, because I was thus cursed.
Jealousy, the craving for a more complete possession, for the ecstasy I
had not found, blind forces in my blood, drove me on to the destruction
of that precious thing. I wrecked myself, I killed him. Oh, Karen, you
know of whom I speak." Convulsively, the blackness of her memories
assailing her in their old forms of horror, Madame von Marwitz sobbed,
burying her face in the bed-clothes, her hand forgetting to clutch at
K