she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon
the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of
life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered
as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love
reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into
boundless infinity.

The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latchkey is heard about half-past
six. The man is thick, strong, common; his jaws are heavy; his eyes are
expressionless; there is about him the loud swagger of the _caserne_;
and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him?--a question
that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten
thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, and sees that his
generation has passed into middle age.

Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious
midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give
him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx
will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls
and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and
not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.

The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look
embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things--of how well he (the
husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he (the
young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned
delight--happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the
husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture,
sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain
moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent