ment of that despair. Then she was saddest of all, because
despair was able to abate. Then sad, because she still lived and felt
vitality within her. Then ... because she began to grow bored. Because
of all this a great despair had filled her strange soul, luxuriantly, as
with the morbid blossoms of strange orchids. She hated, despised, cursed
herself. But nothing changed in her. She was bored.

She led a solitary life at the castle. Her husband and her stepson were
at Lipara; her stepdaughters, to whom she was much attached, were
finishing their education at a convent, of which an imperial princess, a
sister of the emperor, was abbess.

She was alone, she never saw anybody. And she was bored. Life awoke in
her anew, for it had only slumbered, she had deemed it dead, had wished
to bury it in a sepulchre around which her memories should stand as
statues. Within herself, she felt herself to be what she had always
been, in spite of all her love: a woman of the world, hankering after
the glamour of imperial surroundings, that court splendour which fatally
reattracts and is indispensable to those who have inhaled it from their
birth as their vital air. And, at moments when she was not thinking of
her despair, she thought of the Imperial, saw herself there, brilliant
in her ripe beauty, made much of and adored as she had always been.

Then she caused her stepson, the Marquis of Xardi, to spread the rumour
that she was convalescent. A month later, in the middle of the winter
season, after a great court festival but before one of the intimate
assemblies in the empress' own apartments, she requested an audience of
Elizabeth.

Thus she beheld herself in true, clear truth and was deeply mournful in
her poor soul filled with desire of love and desire of the world and
humanity, because life insisted on continuing so cruelly, as in a mad
triumphal progress, crushing her memories under its chariot-wheels,
clattering through her melancholy with its trumpet-blasts, making her
see the paltriness of mankind, the pettiness of its feeling, the
littleness of its soul, which is nevertheless the only thing it has....

* * * * *

The duchess locks the twice-precious casket away again. She forgets what
is going on about her, what is awaiting her; she gazes, dreams and lives
again in the past, with the enjoyment which a woman finds in the past
when she loses her youth.

There is a knock at the door, a footman