possess great talents. I, who know you as you perhaps do not know
yourself, am conscious of it, and can prove it. You had the capacity for
everything. You only needed to choose, and you might have been a great
poet, a great musician, a great artist, a great statesman. And what have
you done with all your brilliant gifts? Used them as men use mirrors to
catch larks, to dazzle silly women."

Robert had listened silently and looked out of the window. Here he
interrupted her. "To shape one's own life harmoniously is also an art,
perhaps the greatest. Whoever makes his life a work of art needs to
create nothing else, and has rightly used his talents."

"But that is exactly what I do not see," cried Else, "the art-production
of your life. Where is the climax, where the harmonious close? Is it
aesthetic, is it dignified to pay court to frivolous actresses and
ballet-dancers, and treat the cheap triumph, before and after, as though
it were something important? Does not this humiliate a man of intellect
in his own eyes? And even if----"

She suppressed what she was going to say, and with a sudden digression,
continued:

"Robert, understand at last that happiness is repose. You have had
passion and excitement enough. It is time for you to know something
else; deep and equable as a clear summer evening, without storm and
tempest. And you know where to find such love. Ah, Robert, no one on
earth ever loved you as I have, not one of the women on whom you have
squandered your heart, your intellect, your health. As a girl I
sacrificed for you my pride and my celebrated beauty. You were my first
passion, and you have remained the sun of my existence. As a young widow
I threw myself at your head. You would not accept me. Perhaps to your
detriment. But that is no consolation. I have forced myself to be your
sister, in order to possess you a little, ah so little. Let me at last
be more to you, Robert. Thiel tells you that you must love no longer.
But you may still allow yourself to be loved. Robert, suffer yourself to
be loved. That is all I ask. Let me be your wife, let me prepare a home
for you. I shall be envied, I shall be proud of you, and repay you with
a fidelity and tenderness which no woman can now give you. Consider,
Robert, to me you are still the young Greek god of eighteen, whom I loved
a generation ago so that it nearly cost my life. Is there any other
woman who sees you with such eyes? Spe