“Do not let us speak of these things. It is useless,” she said with impatience. “You do not understand; you are a man; how can you comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman in four years of the tenderest and closest union? Nothing can destroy it for her. For a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or less tenacious in its hold on him; but to her----.” She stopped abruptly: her companion looked at her with admiration and compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly. “My dear Olga! Once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes such a view as you do of love and life. They are dear to poets, and furnish the themes of the most moving dramas. But they are women who invariably end miserably, either in a cloister like Heloise, or in a tomb like Juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on their lungs at Hyères or the Canaries. You know the world, or you used to know it. You must be aware that there are millions of women who in your place would have consoled themselves long ago. I want you to see the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. I want you to resume your place in the world. I want you to realize that life is like the earth: there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but afterward there is the spring. You know that poem of Sully Prudhomme, in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing flowers a whole year. But that year has never been seen in fact. The poem is wrong artistically and scientifically.” “Of the earth, yes; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken with barrenness for ever.” “But not at your age?” “What has age to do with it?” He sighed; he felt the use of argument, the futility of entreaty. “Are you not too proud a woman,” he said at length, “to sit in the dust, with ashes on your head, smitten to the ground by an unjust sentence?” “I have told you. All my pride is dead; not for a year like Sully Prudhomme’s flowers, but for ever.” “And you forgive the man who killed it?” The blood mantled in her face. “That is a question I cannot allow, even to you, dear Ernst.” He was silenced. “And you are going back to the owls and the bitterns of Schloss Lynar?” he asked, as he took his leave of her half an hour later. “What a life for you, that Swabian solitude!” “The bitterns and owls are very good company, and at least they never offend me.” “Let me be as fortunate!” he said with a sigh. “I may return to-morrow.” “Yes, I do not leave until evening!”