you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose
wounds are still bleeding. My voice was like the axe of a woodsman in
the forest. At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound,
bristling with their anguish like branches robbed of their foliage. I
described to her in feverish language many cruel details which I have
here spared you. I spread before her the treasure of my radiant hopes,
the virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive
beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual
winter. When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings,
related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the
woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with
a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and divine with a single
sentence.

"We have had the same childhood!" she said, turning to me a face on
which the halo of the martyrs shone.

After a pause, in which our souls were wedded in the one consoling
thought, "I am not alone in suffering," the countess told me, in the
voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl
when sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter
bound to her mother's side differed from those of a boy cast out upon
the world of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me
a paradise compared to that contact with a millstone under which her
soul was ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had
saved her from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now
related to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant faultfinding,
always intolerable to high-strung natures which do not shrink before
death itself but die beneath the sword of Damocles; sometimes by the
crushing of generous impulses beneath an icy hand, by the cold