Mrs. Czepanek, however, who had so long compressed her lips in smothered shame when the conversation turned upon her husband, began to speak of his coming back as of an established fact definitely prearranged. More than that, she who in the course of fifteen years had gradually lost her youth, her beauty, her ready wit and laughter, everything she had brought as a marriage dowry to her husband, sinking it, for no reason at all, in a grey pool of self-reproach and anxiety; she who for many years had not tried a coloured ribbon on her sunken breast, who had not troubled to arrange a lock of hair on her forehead, which kept growing higher and higher--this woman became vain again. Each time she received her meagre pay she made haste to invest part of it in powder and beauty creams. In moments of exhaustion, when she could no longer stand on her feet, she quickly whipped a red stick from her pocket and passed it over her thin lips. And about eight o'clock every morning she bustled between the kitchen fire and the sewing machine with a freshly burned wreath of curls. In this way she prepared herself for his return. She would receive her repentant husband in her outstretched arms, bedecked and radiant as a bride. For he was bound to return; that was certain. Where else would he find a comprehending smile like hers, where else the secret soul-harmony which consoles by silence and compels happiness by prayer, which, with the dropping of the rosary beads, secretly insinuates dreamy stipulations with Providence, and dissolves the whole universe into one great minor harmony of yearning? Where else was there a human being who served as she did, without malice and without regret, with body and with soul, who allowed herself to be taken or rejected according to impulse or desire? Thus she had once welcomed him, a young, blond, laughing, unsuspecting thing. She had given herself to him without stint and without questioning; just because he desired it. And she had scarcely felt it as her right and his atonement, when he led her to the altar at the command of her father, an honest subordinate in a court of justice. In fact, Czepanek had been forced into marriage by half the city, which otherwise would have ostracised the seducer and ousted him from his soft berth. Happier she could not be, that she knew. Of the nameless misfortune bound to come she had not the least presentiment; and when it came she took it without complaint; she loved him so very much, she regarded it as the natural indemnity for the unnatural gift of having possessed him. Yet he would come back in spite of all. Whether he wished to or not, he would come. She had in her possession a pledge which chained him to her for all time, and which, sooner or later, must force him to cross her threshold.