This was her hour of freedom, precious to her as gold, the only one that she had entirely to herself in the course of the whole day. She hurried first to the Augustus Bridge, offered her face to the breezes that blew there from every point of the compass, and watched the water rolling under her feet. Next she flew along the bank, like a whirlwind, for she wanted to take in as many fresh impressions and pictures as she could, before creeping back into the connubial yoke. Everything that happened in this blessed hour was fraught with significance. It was all experience, all happiness--the rosy early morning mist hanging over the hills and descending in golden shafts on to the river; the jangle of bells from the Altstadt; the first coy bursting of the buds on the russet boughs; the big waggons rumbling to market; the hissing of the swaying electric wires overhead when a tramcar passed. On these excursions she might even indulge in shop-gazing, as there was no fear of Nemesis in the shape of a present. How greedily she gloated over pictures and _objets d'art_! And now all this was to end. It was over. The gates through which she escaped for one single hour from the perfumed idleness and hothouse closeness of her gilded prison clanged behind her. But so pliable and yielding was her nature that not once in the secret depths of her heart did she complain. He wished it, and that was enough. Such powers of love lay idle within her, crying out for employment, that at this period of inward struggle she was obliged, whether she liked it or not, to give him a double share of tenderness, even whether her thoughts were with him or cantering off on a secret path of dreams. She was his slave, his plaything, his attentive audience. She valeted him, praised his personal beauty, massaged his thighs with salves, arranged the hare-skin on his loins to charm away his gout, gave him his carbonate of soda to correct indiscretions in diet, dressed his grizzled locks with a hairwash, the pungent odour of which turned her sick, and looked on, giving him the benefit of her artistic taste and advice, while he tinted his moustache. And she did it all with eager zeal and naive self-reliance, as if in tending and coaxing him she had found the very aim and end of her existence. In the process, however, he became divested for her of every rag of his godlike attributes, so that nothing was left but a once soldierly, though now vain, and capricious man--mentally effete, for all his vaunted intellect; brutal, for all his refined tastes, with his appetites prematurely sated and enervated.