It cannot be denied that her mind dwelt with bitterness on the hardness
of her situation. More than once she had thought of changing her mode
of life to plunge into a pietist course of simplicity and asceticism.
But when the morning came, the emptiness of her existence made the
diversion of personal adornment a necessity. There was nothing else to
do. And yet she never pressed her husband to go and live in town, nor
to fill the castle with visitors. She had lost all hold upon the
current of events in the outer world; and as she looked at herself in
her mirror, and saw better than any one else the remorseless signature
of time etched deep in the face that had once been pretty, she felt a
sharp pain in her breast, and a sinking at the heart, for she knew that
it was all over and that she had grown old. There were even moments
when she feared lest she were becoming ridiculous, for she had not
originally been without a certain acute perception in regard to
herself. But the fear of ridicule is never strong unless a comparison
of ourselves with others is possible, and Frau von Greifenstein lived
too much alone to suffer long any such imaginary terrors. The time when
she might still have made a figure in the world had gone by, however,
and she knew it, and as any desire for change which she had formerly
felt had sprung from the wish to be seen, rather than from the wish to
see others, she was becoming resigned to her fate. She had reached that
sad period at which half the pleasure of life consists in dreaming of
what one might have done twenty years ago. It is a dreary amusement,
but people who are very hopeless and solitary find it better than none
at all.

Greifenstein read on, without much punctuation and with no change of
tone. There was an article upon the European situation, another upon
tariffs, the court news, the gazette, the festivities projected for a
certain great event. It was all the same to him.