wolf and ape, the strongest emotion of which my heart was capable. For
the children of the house there could be no union by marriage; in body
and soul they differed from me: they had no name for that feeling which
I had so often and so vainly declared; therefore they had told me again
and again that there was only one kind of love, for they, alas! could
experience one kind only. I did not, for the moment, seek further in the
book, or pause to reflect on that still unexplained mystery, which was
the very center and core of the whole mater, namely, the existence of
the father and mother in the house, from whose union the family was
renewed, and who, fruitful themselves, were yet the parents of a barren
race. Nor did I ask who their successors would be: for albeit
long-lived, they were mortal like their own passionless children, and in
this particular house their lives appeared now to be drawing to an end.
These were questions I cared nothing about. It was enough to know that
Yoletta could never love me as I loved her--that she could never be
mine, body and soul, in my way and not in hers. With unspeakable
bitterness I recalled my conversation with Chastel: now all her
professions of affection and goodwill, all her schemes for smoothing my
way and securing my happiness, seemed to me the veriest mockery, since
even she had read my heart no better than the others, and that chill
moonlight felicity, beyond which her children were powerless to imagine
anything, had no charm for my passion-torn heart.

Presently, when I began to recover somewhat from my stupefaction, and to
realize the magnitude of my loss, the misery of it almost drove me mad.
I wished that I had never made this fatal discovery, that I might have
continued still hoping and dreaming, and wearing out my heart with
striving after the impossible, since any fate would have been preferable
to the blank desolation which now confronted me. I even wished to
possess the power of some implacable god or demon, that I might shatter