“But you are about to say, the individual who rebels against the arrangements of society is ostracized, branded, stoned. So be it. I am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. I will live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy. The inventors of the Christian marriage have done well, simultaneously to invent immortality. I, however, have no wish to live eternally. When with my last breath everything as far as Wanda von Dunajew is concerned comes to an end here below, what does it profit me whether my pure spirit joins the choirs of angels, or whether my dust goes into the formation of new beings? Shall I belong to one man whom I don’t love, merely because I have once loved him? No, I do not renounce; I love everyone who pleases me, and give happiness to everyone who loves me. Is that ugly? No, it is more beautiful by far, than if cruelly I enjoy the tortures, which my beauty excites, and virtuously reject the poor fellow who is pining away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and I live serenely for the sake of pleasure and enjoyment.” While she was speaking her eyes sparkled roguishly, and I had taken hold of her hands without exactly knowing what to do with them, but being a genuine dilettante I hastily let go of them again. “Your frankness,” I said, “delights me, and not it alone—” My confounded dilettantism again throttled me as though there were a rope around my neck. “You were about to say—” “I was about to say—I was—I am sorry—I interrupted you.” “How, so?” A long pause. She is doubtless engaging in a monologue, which translated into my language would be comprised in the single word, “donkey.” “If I may ask,” I finally began, “how did you arrive at these—these conclusions?” “Quite simply, my father was an intelligent man. From my cradle onward I was surrounded by replicas of ancient art; at ten years of age I read _Gil Blas_, at twelve _La Pucelle_. Where others had Hop-o’-my-thumb, Bluebeard, Cinderella, as childhood friends, mine were Venus and Apollo, Hercules and Lackoon. My husband’s personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: ‘Well, have you already picked out a lover?’ I blushed with shame. ‘Don’t deceive me,’ he added on one occasion, ‘that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.’ “I suppose, I hardly need tell you that during his life time I had no lover; but it was through him that I have become what I am, a woman of Greece.” “A goddess,” I interrupted. “Which one,” she smiled. “Venus.”