The scorpion

While Myra was dressing to go to the artists’ ball, she was not conscious of any effort to beautify herself in order to attract attention, to please, to cause sensation. Indeed, she desired to attract as little attention as possible, and would have given a good deal to be invisible, or to watch the hubbub from a gallery or a darkened adjoining room.

She selected a very simple black taffeta dress quite void of color or boldness of line. Nevertheless, she could not prevent something striking in her appearance. Perhaps it was caused by the anticipation which flamed up in the depths of her lifeless eyes and which was in such sharp contrast to the gentle, almost colorless composure of her pale face.

* * *

As Myra took off her coat in the vestibule of the little villa and was at once surrounded by a throng of persons in fantastic costumes, and a throng of noises, her immediate thought was of escaping. She looked for little Mara Luigi who was raising waves of people about her. Perhaps no one would notice if she asked for her coat again and slipped quietly out the door. She glanced about, weighing the chances of flight, and encountered the eyes of Eccarius who stood directly behind her.

“Look around a bit first,” he said soothingly as if he had divined her thoughts, “and if it’s too much for you, give me a sign and I’ll take you home. I have no intention of staying here till daybreak myself.”

The rooms were large and bright, and so full of noisy people that Myra grew dizzy. A thin, bluish pall of smoke hung over the groups and spun in rings around the lamps. Faces stood out, impressed themselves on Myra’s mind, sharp and yet unreal, like visions in a fever—then disappeared again.

Eccarius remained at her side, pointing occasionally to someone whom she could not discover in the throng, or mentioning some name that she did not understand or could not catch because it had no meaning for her.

A tall, slender, beautiful girl passed them in a sort of page’s costume. Eccarius called to her and she stopped and greeted him. Myra had an opportunity to observe her. She wore black silk knee-breeches, white stockings, a jacket with lace cuffs, and had secured her dark, curling hair in a great black knot at her neck. Her features were clear and regular, a high and beautifully modelled forehead, and an almost challenging, free and bold expression which captivated Myra at first glance. She seemed to perceive that Myra did not feel quite at home in that tumult. She took her by the hand like a child.

“Come,” she said, half to Myra, half to Eccarius, “I’ll take this little girl to Nora. She is always ‘the pole of repose in the flux of appearances.’ You’ll feel much better with her. Good Lord!” She took Myra’s chin in her hand and turned her face to Eccarius. “Doesn’t she look like a little child on its first day at school? Come, baby; you shall have a place of honor.”

She forced her way through chattering, noisy groups. Everywhere the beautiful woman was called to, stopped, embraced, greeted, questioned. With a patience and affability that never altered she always managed to release herself again, but it took a quarter of an hour for Myra and her to cross two rooms.

At the end of the second room was a raised alcove on which, towering above the other chairs and a table with a charming cover, stood a Renaissance easy-chair, with high and very beautifully carved arms. In this arm-chair, standing out against its strawberry-red brocade as against a painted background, sat a very fair woman, dressed in white, softly flowing white veils over her shoulders, a soft white covering over her knees.

Myra was astounded at first sight by the beauty of this vision. On closer inspection she perceived that the woman in the chair had passed her fortieth birthday, that she was too buxom to be beautiful, that age and sickness had ravaged and obscured the once pure lines of her face. But the next moment, as Myra held her warm, matronly hand, and felt a smile of indescribably warming cordiality and kindness envelop her, she forgot all about beauty or ugliness, and surrendered without reserve to the mild fascination of this personality.

“Here, Norina.” The slender page laid her arm lightly across Myra’s shoulder. “Take this little girl under your protecting wings. Else she’ll be lost in the hubbub.”

Something in the words, the solicitude concealed by a gentle irony, recalled Olga so vividly that Myra wanted to howl like a whipped dog. She no longer seemed to see the bright room with its throngs of people and strange faces as through panes of glass. They seemed to crowd in upon her, somehow to break through those glass casements which she had set about her life. It was all too much after the silence and solitude of the last few weeks. She felt herself in a condition not unlike a violent attack of fever.

Myra had to smile when she saw a shade of concern pass over the fair face of the woman while the room seemed whirling about her. She felt a chair moved against her legs while she was forced to her seat by gentle but firm hands.

She was sitting on a low chair close beside the high arm-chair.

“There,” said the dark-toned voice behind her. “Now if it’s too bright, or too loud, or too gay for you, just lay your little head against the arm of my chair and creep under my veil. That’s what I always do.”

Obediently, Myra nestled her cheek against the arm of the high chair and felt the veil being drawn over her head. A gentle scent of mignonette emanated from the soft, filmy silk.

Nora turned to Myra. “You mustn’t imagine that it’s always as gay here as it is tonight. You must come sometime when we are more intimate, more quiet. We have a nice little garden which is our real joy. Just as long as it is possible, we take tea out there and love to have someone keep us company.”

“Yes, when the flag is up!” laughed the young person on the step, turning with a jerk. “You ought to know that we do here as at court. When their majesties are at home, the flag is hoisted!”

“You ought to explain, Will,” Nora amended, “just how it is done. On the roof of the arbor there is something like a little flag-staff en miniature, with a gay little pennant on it. You can see it from all sides, even in front, if you are passing the house.

“But if Sophie has to work very hard, or I am not feeling particularly well, we haul in the little flag. Then no one, at least none of the initiates, needs trouble to come to the door simply to be turned away. For, of course, that’s always painful to both sides. For those who have to interrupt their work or control their illness, and are disagreeable hostesses anyway; or for those who feel like disturbers of the peace. If they are really turned away, they usually think, ‘Well, they might have made an exception in my case,’ or, ‘They did not have to have the maid tell me.’ Most of them are habituated to the lie they tell themselves: There is no one at home. That someone should be working never seems a sufficient excuse for them.

“But all our friends know that I never leave the house and Sophie very rarely. So the little flag is there to avoid any unpleasantness. When it is unfurled that means, ‘Please come in, we’re expecting you.’ Then there’s no need even to come through the house, for everyone who wishes can enter by the garden-gate, or if it should be locked can jump the hedge, eh, Will?”

But Will had sprung up and motioned with his hand without even glancing back, for he was staring intently into the room where a circle was gathering around a dancing couple.

“Fiametta is dancing,” he called back, with a hasty turn of his head, “the woman is marvellous! You must see her!”

Quite youthful in his impetuousness, he seized Myra by the elbow and dragged her from her chair to the step.

“I ask you, have you ever seen anything like that in all your life? Isn’t she dazzling? Isn’t she perfect?”

In the rather narrow circle which the crowding spectators had left free, a slender, well-built young man was dancing with a woman of refined beauty and great charm. She was so perfectly at one with the music that its tones seemed to emanate from her supple body.

She had a manner of dancing such as Myra had never before seen. Her movements were gentle, cool, subdued, noble and almost solemn. At the same time it seemed as if the beautiful girl consumed a vast reserve of strength in compelling her symmetrical body to maintain its dignified repose, as if it would have required only a moment’s forgetfulness for that bridled temperament to leap up like a flame, for those soft, relaxed muscles to turn to steel and impel her sinewy body through the air, like a wild beast springing on its prey.

Myra felt a kind of painful, burning sensation at the sight of her, and when she sought, with her habitual honesty, to account for it, she decided that it was envy. A thousand appraising glances could never embarrass this woman: it would have been no task for her to cross a crowded dining-room to her table.

“Isn’t she marvellous?” said the young man beside Myra, aglow with enthusiasm, “isn’t she fascinating? Isn’t it just as if she stepped out of another century? Out of a century when there were still beautiful women, beautiful women who left the stamp of their personality on their environment, the courts, the city, the arts!”

Myra nodded silently. She would have been glad had he kept silent, too, for she wanted to know what was being said behind her. She could hear Nora’s quiet, gentle voice.

“Certainly, she is very beautiful, Ulrich. She has breeding, temperament and culture, everything one could wish, but she is a little strange to me, and a little strange she will always remain. Perhaps it will sound very silly and sentimental to you if I say that she has no heart. But I really believe that she has not even the most elementary sort of kindliness....”

Myra could not catch what Ulrich might have objected. But she heard Nora’s reply.

“No, Ulrich, I cannot agree with you. A woman without kindliness is something without charm, without fragrance for me, no matter if she is as beautiful as your Fiametta. Oh, yes, I know you have a foible for her, and forgive in her everything that you would never forgive in another. Of course, no one is obliged to love simply because she is loved by another. But then one should not arouse feelings in others if one has no use for them....”

“Oh, that! Yes, she does do that! And not in one case only—in hundreds of cases. And she keeps right on doing it! She completely ruined poor little Miss Bernhardt, she drove Erwin half mad, and she’s destroying Gisela now—for the mere diversion!”

At the name of Gisela Myra started. So this was the woman for whose sake Gisela’s life was being destroyed—poor Gisela! Oh, Myra knew only too well that it is possible to be destroyed for a woman’s sake! Her heart burned with anger and pity, with painful recollection and a desire to help, to alleviate, to save.

She had not another glance to spare for the beautiful woman. Her eyes sought Gisela, and found her on the opposite side of the room, her shoulders hunched over, the inevitable cigarette between her lips, staring into space with an expression of complete abstraction. Myra chose a moment when Mara Luigi was approaching Gisela, to turn to Nora and excuse herself.

“If you will pardon me, I should like to say a word to Miss Luigi.”

Nora’s tone seemed to veil a mild astonishment. “Ah, you know her? Are you friends?”

Myra felt a sudden redness invade her cheeks and forehead.

“Yes.... No ... that is, we stay at the same pension,” she said somewhat embarrassed.

She forced a path for herself along the walls, fearing all the while that little Mara would have stopped talking to Gisela by the time she reached her. She felt that she was committing a deed of great daring. She had a feeling, almost of homesickness, for the low seat beside the soft, concealing veil; she thought of herself as a half-fledged bird that has abandoned its nest to make a flight into the world.

But a fierce impulse drove her forward.

“I must not be a coward,” she thought, “I will have my destiny and I will go forward to meet it. I will open my arms and bear with joy everything that is meted out to me. I will love life no matter what it brings.”

The sweet, hot dance melodies quivered through the air. They seemed to force Myra’s steps to fall into their light and fiery rhythms, while her thoughts kept iterating like the refrain of a song, “I will love life, I will love life.”

When Myra stood before Gisela and Mara had mentioned names and made a gesture of presentation, there was that strange feeling again—“What is the purpose of it all? What will happen now? We have been introduced, that is, we know one another’s names, the series of letters whereby we are listed in official registers, and that gives us the right to talk to one another. But nothing gives me the right to utter what I am thinking. If I were to say, ‘I wanted to know you because you make me feel so dreadfully sorry, because Mrs. Meidinger has told me that you take morphine in order to deaden your grief, your sorrow over a woman, and because I understand you so well and would like to try to help you, or at least be unhappy with you’—if I said that to her, they would shut me up in a lunatic asylum. And quite rightly, for if I were in a normal state of mind I could never bring myself to say such things.”

“I believe that I have seen you before,” said Myra with a reserved smile, half to Gisela, half to Mara Luigi. “Weren’t you at the pension recently?”

“Yes, of course,” Gisela’s dark eyes were fastened on Myra. “That’s where I saw you, too. That’s why your face looked so familiar to me. Come on and sit down beside me, there’s still room.”

“Thanks,” said Myra and smoothed her taffeta dress before she sat down.

Again she felt a slight anxiety because she thought that it was her duty to say something, something, too, that would lift her above the average—but she couldn’t think of anything.

Gisela was not so easily embarrassed in beginning a conversation. “You know little Luigi from the pension, don’t you?”

Myra nodded.

“She brought you here, didn’t she? You haven’t got anything to do with art and such awful things, have you?”

“Unfortunately, no,” said Myra.

“Unfortunately? Thank God and your most honorable parents that you have a decent occupation.”

“But I haven’t any.”

“Haven’t any? That’s the most decent of all.”

“Are you serious? I think it’s dreadful not to have any occupation.”

“Why dreadful? Having an occupation means being paid for work. Taking money from somebody, that means being subservient to somebody, whether it’s an individual, or a company, or the public. Being at the public’s beck and call is the worst of all! If you have no occupation and don’t need to have one, then you’re your own master! That is to say, you’re not anybody else’s servant. Why is that dreadful?”

“I don’t know.” Myra wrung her hands with a gesture of helplessness. “Perhaps because then we don’t belong anywhere. Home has no meaning for us any more. I was born and brought up in the city. But does that give me any feeling of home? Yes, perhaps, if I were in Tokio and heard someone from the city talking I might discover some such feeling in myself, and might even become sentimental with him, when we thought of Potsdam or Linden. But just think how ridiculous it would be if we addressed somebody in Lucerne or Baden-Baden with ‘I believe you come from my native city!’

“We have no families any more either! Or we have no use for them. Sometimes I envy the old noble houses with their hundreds of branches, each linked by name. But above all I envy people who have an occupation, for every cobbler has connections with every other cobbler, cabmen have something in common with all other cabmen, physicians have their colleagues to help them in almost every village on the earth. The artists are like one big family, especially theatrical people. And sometimes—I don’t know if you will understand the feeling—it seems to me that it must be good to be chained quite firmly to something—so that one will not plunge into the abyss.”

“Oh, I understand it all right.... Have a cigarette?” She offered a narrow birchen case. “Only, I don’t altogether believe in this fellow-feeling of fellow-workers. No more than I believe in blood relationships. The greatest stranger in the world to me is my own sister. No, no, the same kind of education, the same kind of interests—they have about as much to do with people’s feeling for one another as the same kind of incomes.”

“But one must feel one belongs somewhere,” Myra objected, bewildered.

Gisela shrugged her shoulders wearily. “Yes, if you want to feel happy, to feel secure. But our best emotion is probably a fellow-feeling for our fellow man. Only, it is in very rare cases that we ever discover who he is. And what else is there? Sometime I think that people who have suffered the same misfortune, the same sickness should band together. The blind, the lame, the hunchbacked.”

This was approximately what Myra herself had previously thought. But when she heard it uttered by someone else, it roused her opposition.

“I don’t think,” she said reflectively, “that I would like to see myself surrounded by my own infirmities, especially if they were exaggerated or distorted, any more than I’d like to see myself in a mirror if I were a leper. At bottom it always pleases people more to hide their infirmities and keep them as inconspicuous as possible. And I don’t believe either that the ailing are especially sympathetic to one another! Everyone says to himself, ‘He’s a much worse case than I am!’”

A young man came up to Gisela and embraced her with a girlishly gentle and fawning gesture.

“You must sing something for us, Gisela,” he pleaded, “please, please, be nice!”

She shook her head without answering, knitting her brows a little.

But he did not release her and begged like a child. “Oh, please! Do be nice! Only for a few of us, one tiny little song!”

“My lute isn’t here, John.”

“Oh, you can use Sophus’, but come!”

With gentle coercion John tugged her from her place. His narrow face, sensitive features and delicate bloom of color were almost angelic in their beauty. His fair, gently waving hair was a little too long, his big dark blue eyes too soft, almost ardent in their expression.

Despite his surprising beauty, Myra thought his exterior almost repellent. But after a few moments she decided that it was really his costume which disturbed her, because it suited him so little. In a white tunic, in a silk doublet with puff sleeves, even in a gold embroidered rococo jacket he would have been a perfect picture.

Gisela, still tightly embraced by his arm, held out her hand to Myra. “Come with us, little girl,” she said. “I can’t promise you any great enjoyment, but I’ll be flattered if you’ll listen to my croakings.”

Myra seized the outstretched hand, letting it draw her along. It was a slender, feverishly hot, ruinously thin hand that clasped her fingers in a loose, but tenacious grip.

Somewhere in the distance she saw Eccarius’ face emerge. He did not even glance at her, and yet his grave and worried face seemed a reproach to her.

“I suppose I ought to pay some attention to him.” A slight feeling of fear, then her defiance blazed high. “But why should I? Why must I always be talking obligations into myself which really aren’t mine? From now on I’ll have regard for no one, I’ll go where I feel attracted—and only where I feel attracted!”

In the small adjoining room a dozen people were sitting, lying and crouching in the most varied postures. Sophie was there in her becoming page’s costume. Beside her was the young man called Will who had sat on the top of the alcove step, little Mara Luigi and the painter Giesbert, who was wearing a kind of cowboy costume, and Ulrich, the man with the grave, haggard face, and deep minor voice.

Someone lifted Gisela’s slight, light figure and set it on a table. John took the lute from Sophie and laid it in Gisela’s arms.

A young person in a silk Pierrot’s costume who was dashing about with a tray of glasses, offered one to Myra. Myra drank down the sweet and fiery wine at a draught, in order to be rid of the glass, and found herself searching for a seat.

Sophie extended her hand to her. “Come here to me, little lost bird,” she said. “No one will hurt you here.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Myra smiling.

And she really was not. She felt quite content and well concealed in the deep, soft silk cushions between two faces that did not seem strange or unpleasant to her.

Little John with his page-like grace seated himself at her feet. And although she felt no particular liking for him, she enjoyed his slightly cuddling touch.

Gisela tuned the strings, her head bent low. Her loose black hair fell about her cheeks. With a sudden toss she raised her head, shook back her hair, and after a few opening chords began to sing.

Her voice was small as if muffled by a veil, but the deeper tones especially had a passionate, enthralling ring. Myra felt as if she were caught in the web of a sweet, dreamy happiness that was, nevertheless, a painful longing.

Sophie had put her arm around her, and now and again her hand kept time to the music by stroking Myra’s shoulder gently and soothingly.

Sometimes Gisela’s eyes sought out Myra while she was singing. Their glances met, were fixed one upon another, and it seemed to Myra as if Gisela were singing every word to her. “Sweet life,” she thought, “beautiful, beloved life!”

She felt a feverish longing that filled her heart to overflowing. It was a longing without name or object. It was a longing for distant lands, a longing for affection. It was a longing for glittering fame, for heroic deeds, and a longing, too, for grandmother’s quiet garden, for the meadow over which the bees hummed.

A shade of almost sorrowful gravity passed over Sophie’s beautiful, cheerful features. She smiled, but it seemed as if her smile were steeped in melancholy.

“Wait a moment.” She motioned to Gisela with her hand. “I want to get Nora. You know how much she loves to listen to you.”

She rose abruptly. John sprang up at the same moment. “Can I help you?” he asked, it was a plea.

Myra thought his words sounded mysterious.

Sophie and John did not enter the large hall-like room from which they had come. Sophie opened a glass-door behind a curtain which gave upon the night-darkened garden.

“Leave it open a moment,” she begged. “It is so warm outside. We’ll be back this way.”

Gisela hesitated. Some interior struggle was reflected in her mobile features.

“Sophie,” she called, springing down from the high table, “would you rather that I came with you? I can sing in the next room just as well.”

“No, no,” said Sophie. She was standing on the step and had lifted the two parts of the curtain so that they framed her slender figure for a moment. “It is so crowded and smoky in there, and dusty from the dancing, and one can’t make the whole crowd listen quietly. Besides, I’m glad to have a good reason for enticing Nora out for a while. She’d never decide to come herself, and if she doesn’t, the evening will be too much for her.”

She nodded gratefully to Gisela and vanished in the darkness. Through the half-open door, streamed the manifold fragrances of the night and its flowers.

Over the little circle lay an expectant silence. Those who were sitting side by side made observations in hushed voices. Gisela strummed her lute without raising her eyes.

The murmured conversation presently grew louder and somewhat more lively, only to subside entirely when heavy steps were heard crunching the gravel in the garden. Then the most intimate friends of the household began to talk rapidly again in a fashion that seemed to say: “We were not waiting for you, we shall pay no particular notice to you when you come.”

Involuntarily Myra glanced at the garden-door, and though she instantly controlled herself, she started and felt that she had turned pale.

They were leading, they were dragging Nora in.

Sophie was supporting her on one side, John on the other. But they could not raise her heavy upper body; it sagged forward as if it were bent, broken. With an effort Nora raised her head, and her soft brown eyes, filled with silent suffering, like those of an injured animal, met Myra’s for a second.

Ulrich moved up a chair, Will set down cushions for her feet; an instant later she was sitting in her easy-chair, her hands laid upon its arms, her knees, which were drawn up a little higher than most people’s, covered by the lightly flowing folds of her silken veils, her fair head laid back upon a violet-colored cushion. Again a picture of almost queenly beauty.

Not unless one observed closely, was a slight twitching discernible around her mouth and cheeks—from pain or the unusually violent exertion.

Myra’s heart was quite filled with contradictory feelings. She felt a terror that verged on horror and even aversion; an anguish of sympathy, but at the same time, a fear as of dark veils falling, of a slowly settling, unbearable burden.

Had not life been simply bright and gay and alluring? Had she not loved it with a hot, longing, ardent, sacrificing love? And was it not now as if a fiery and flexible dancer, the swaying of whose arms had intoxicated her, suddenly had torn the mask from his face, and with a mocking grin pointed to a fleshless death’s head?

What was there in the world after all? What could one expect from life? Misery and affliction, sickness and death, and bitter, freezing solitude....

Gisela plucked several chords and began to sing.

She bowed her head lower over her instrument. It was strange how the tones found their way out of her restricted breast.

Everyone was silent when she had finished.

Will was the first to speak. “More, more,” he cried. “Another, another!”

Others shouted after him. Gisela slipped down from the table and laid the lute in a corner. Her weary movements were those of a child, but her face, which was always narrow, had become old and small.

“I believe I cannot sing any more,” she said, as if asking forgiveness. Her voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.

Through the door of the adjoining room came an elderly fat man with an ugly, bloated face. Inside, someone was thumping the piano, but it could hardly be heard for the noise and laughter and the shuffling of dragging feet.

The fat man seized little John around the body with a firm grip. “Come, Johnnie boy, we’ll dance,” he cried and pulled him about in a circle. John swayed from his hips like a coquettish girl. Myra observed for the first time that above his small and narrow foot in its low-cut patent-leather pumps, he was wearing open-work silk stockings.

Suddenly she loathed him. She loathed the fat man. She loathed Gisela because her face looked old and sick and worn out. She loathed Will because he spattered wine down Mara Luigi’s low-neck dress, and then ran his hand down her back on the pretext that he was drying her. She loathed Mara Luigi because she was pleased by the performance although she shrieked and kicked and struggled.

Myra felt a terrible longing for the peaceful solitude of her own room.

Giesbert was standing before her, asking her to dance with him. She pressed with both hands against his arms which were seeking to clasp her and carry her away.

“Please, don’t,” she said, impatient but pleading. “Don’t, don’t, please, I don’t like it!”

Suddenly, after she had released herself and was swaying a little dizzily, her glance came to rest on Eccarius’ face. He approached her with a gentle smile, and involuntarily she extended her hand to him. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she would have liked to say. “I want to go home!”

Then it occurred to her that she had no right to command him as she would a servant, when she had not given him a thought the whole evening.

But before she had found anything to say, he spoke himself. “You look tired, Miss Rudloff. I don’t want to hurry you, if you still wish to stay here. But if you would like to go, simply say so.”

Myra was heartily grateful to him, although she had again been almost shocked by his ugliness as he suddenly appeared before her.

She was not entirely satisfied with herself. It must be her own fault that she was always seeing ugly and pathetic things everywhere. Probably she was not strong enough for life, not healthy enough, not stupid, or perhaps not wise, enough.

Everywhere life had angles and edges, points and sharp corners. Wherever one groped among the rosy, shimmering clouds that so beautifully enveloped them, one was struck and hurt. One had to be a cobble-stone or a diamond not to be shattered by their hardness.

She walked after Eccarius in an almost stony silence. Let him think what he would of her! She was tired and upset, angry and dispirited. She had no desire to torment herself further with a laboredly indifferent conversation.

Eccarius allowed her time to cool her feverishly hot forehead in the night air. She gazed up at the bright flames of the stars and again, as always, felt the need to spread her folded wings, to launch herself at last, at last into the infinite; so impatient was she that her heart was depressed, her breathing labored, and there was an aching against her ribs.

Finally, after a long time, she heard a quiet voice beside her utter what seemed to be the last link in a long chain of thought.

“You will do me a great favor, Miss Rudloff, if you do not pass judgment upon your hostesses and their house because of this evening’s rather”—he hesitated—“rather turbulent festivities. You must sit out there in their garden with them some quiet afternoon and talk with both ladies. I am quite certain that you might gain much by it, and it would be a pity if tonight’s performance had spoiled your taste for it.”

Myra felt as if she had been looked through and through and was a little ashamed.

“Oh, of course not,” she said with some embarrassment. “I was really very charmed by both ladies. I am simply not accustomed to such noisy society. Ah, I am really not accustomed to sociability at all, and there were simply too many and too varied impressions for me. I am suffering a little from a carrousel feeling, if you can imagine what that is.”

“Oh, yes,” Eccarius laughed softly. “I imagine that it is mostly dizziness and nausea.”

“Not only,” said Myra, “but music too, music that keeps droning on, and a lot of gaiety and a lot of light, a mysterious and fascinating gaiety—pearl-bespangled, dazzling decorations behind which mysterious, alluring, weird things are concealed—the driving power, the machinery, the engine. And out of the darkness appear single brightly illuminated faces that keep vanishing and reappearing. But above all, above all is the impression of a longed-for pleasure that has been tasted till one is sick and tired of it.”

“That’s all right then.” Eccarius smiled as if his thoughts were already somewhere else. “You did not know that Nora is an invalid?” he inquired after a pause.

“No,” said Myra. Then, half involuntarily, as if driven by a sense of guilt for which she somehow hoped to atone, she said, “Oh, she made me feel so terribly bad!”

“She has had a very sad life,” said Eccarius, rather reluctantly, “but in spite of that, I would not say that she makes me feel bad. Somehow I wouldn’t dare say that. It would seem almost presumptuous of me. There is so much about the woman that compels one’s admiration, so much that is superior to us, so much that one can almost envy, that pity, in my opinion, hardly enters into the case.”

Myra felt that his remark was worded very discreetly in order that she might understand, though not too harshly or emphatically, that she had said something stupid. She was grateful to him for his considerateness, for it hurt her dreadfully to be corrected by anyone.

“At any rate, I will make every effort to know her better,” she said with a hearty determination. “I believe that there is much to be learned from her, and there is nothing I need more in this world than to learn.”

“It is already a great deal simply to know that,” said Eccarius with a smile. “Most young people of twenty think they know enough. If you always pick your instructresses with as sure an instinct, you can’t go far wrong.”

“I hope so.” Myra knitted her brows. Fear again cast its shadow on her like a cloud, fear of making a misstep, of becoming bewildered, of straying into treacherous morasses, of walking into an abyss—courting disaster in some form or other.

“In any case, I won’t have to suffer any long-drawn death,” she thought, “when my shattered limbs are lying at the bottom of the abyss. Then there will be nothing left for me but Olga’s bequest—my friend, the revolver!”