"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 Karen's sleeve. She lifted her face and the tears streamed from under her closed lids. "Let me not think of it or I shall go mad. How could I, having known that devotion, sink to the place where you have seen me? Be pitiful. He needed me so much--I believed. My youth was fading; I was growing old. Soon the time was to come when no man's heart would turn to me. Be pitiful. You do not know what it is to look without and see life slowly growing dark and look within and see only sinister memories. It came to me like late sunlight--like cool, sweet water--his love. I believed in it. I loved him. Oh--" she sobbed, "how I loved him, Karen! How my heart was torn with sick jealousy when I saw that his had turned from me to you. I loved you, Karen, yet I hated you. Open your generous heart to me, my child; do not spurn me from you. Understand how it may be that one can strike at the thing one loves. I knew myself in the grasp of an evil passion, but I could not tear it from me. I even feared, with a savage fear that seemed to eat into my brain, that you responded to his love. Oh, Karen, it was not I who spoke those shameful