"Oh, you know you might not have come," she responded with a sigh. "Such a woman as I am." "Such a woman as you are! What do you mean?" "Well, I mean that it wouldn't be surprising if people didn't keep their word to me." He felt a bitter resentment against this sort of self-abasement. "I must beg you, Lizzie," he said, "to drop this false humility. You are the wife of Ulrich von Kletzingk. As such, you have the right to claim respect, the highest respect from me and every one else. And who doesn't ..." He broke off and raised his fists, so that she withdrew frightened into a corner of the lounge. "Pray, for goodness' sake, don't get so angry again," she whispered. "I am miserable enough." "That is to be all over now," he said. "What, my misery?" she asked with a disconsolate smile. Then he began with vehement zeal to describe to her what he proposed the future should be. He had a double mission in her house. First, Ulrich's happiness; secondly, her rehabilitation. With his assistance she was to free herself from the oppressive consciousness of the old guilt, she was to learn to hold up her head again, and to get used to a sense of reconquered dignity, so that it was not to be conceived for a moment that the most impertinent dared approach her with anything less than what was due to her position. "You paint Heaven to me," she murmured, and a tremulous radiance began to gleam in her eyes. "I only paint what it is possible to realise," he answered. "When we open this door, Lizzie, all the old rottenness must be sloughed off. We shall begin a new life from that moment." She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and exhaled over him a cloud of the perfume she habitually used. The discreet delicacy of the iris was overpowered by the sharp sweetness of the opoponax, so that, half-suffocated by the pungent odour of the atmosphere around her, he made for the window. His glance wandered round the one-windowed apartment, which had once been his own putting-up quarters; it was now transformed, regardless of cost, into the luxurious nest of a fashionable woman of the world. The walls were hung with blue brocade; small gilded chairs, with butterfly-wings for backs, card-tables, tabourets and stools of every description, were dotted about, crouching on the Indian carpet like fabulous beasts. A gigantic fan of snow-white marabou feathers served as a screen for the stove. Bronzes and antique bric-a-brac figures, dainty and alluring, populated the cabinets; a marqueterie bookcase contained the mistress's favourite volumes, bound in ivory-coloured vellum, and an old Venetian altar-cloth was draped in coquettish folds over it as a curtain. Above the writing-table there shone in Carrara marble the dreamy head of the Vatican Eros, outlined with a bluish tinge, for the light penetrated to it through a blue and gold embroidered gauze background, flooding the room one moment with a subdued duskiness, the next with vivid flashes of sunshine.