This evening Cecile had written a great deal into her diary; and she now paced up and down in her room, with locked hands hanging before her and her head slightly bowed and a fixed look in her eyes. There was anxiety about her mouth. Before her was the vision, as she had conceived it. He loved her with his soul alone, not as a woman who is pretty and good, but with a higher love than that, with the finest nervous fibres of his being—his real being—with the supreme emotion of the very essence of his soul. Thus she felt that he loved her and in no other way, with contemplation, with adoration. Thus she felt it actually, through a sympathetic power of divination by which each of them was able to guess what actually passed within the other. And this was his happiness—his first, as he said—thus to love her and in no other way. Oh, she well understood him! She understood his illusion, which he saw in her; and she now knew that, if she really wished to love him for his sake and not for her own, she must needs appear to be nothing else to him, she must preserve his illusion of a woman not of flesh, one who desired none of the earthly things that other women did, one who should be soul alone, a sister soul to his. But, while she saw before her this vision of her love, calm and radiant, she saw also the struggle which awaited her, the struggle with herself, with her own distress: distress because he thought of her so highly and named her Madonna, the while she longed only to be lowly and his slave. She would have to seem the woman he saw in her, for the sake of his happiness, and the part would be a heavy one for her to support, for she loved him, ah, with such simplicity, with all her woman’s heart, wishing to give herself to him entirely, as only once in her life a woman gives herself, whatever the sacrifice might cost her, the sacrifice made in ignorance of herself and perhaps afterwards to be made in bitterness and sorrow! The outward appearance of her conduct and her inward consciousness of herself: the conflict of these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness would be endured for him, deliberately for him and for him alone. Oh, the luxury to suffer for one whom she loved as she loved him; to be tortured with inner longing, that he might not come to her with the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she loved him enough to go to him with open arms and beg for the alms of his caresses; but also to feel that she loved him more than that and more highly and that—not from pride or bashfulness, which are really egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness—she never would, never could, be a suppliant before him!

To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness on earth save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life, had spent long, long years, without feeling until this day that such luxury could exist, not as a fantasy in rhymes, but as a reality in her heart. She had been a young girl and had read the poets and what they rhyme of love; and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle comprehension and yet without ever having had the least acquaintance with emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married, had borne children. Her married life flashed through her mind in a lightning-flicker of memory; and she stopped still before the portrait of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face, with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly-intelligent eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests when he was Foreign Minister. Her receptions and dinners flickered up in her mind, so many scenes of worldliness; and she clearly recalled her husband’s eye taking in everything with a quick glance of approval or disapproval: the arrangement of her rooms, her dress, the ordering of her parties. Her marriage had not been unhappy; her husband was a little cold and unexpansive, wrapped wholly in his ambition; but he was attached to her after his fashion and even tenderly; she too had been fond of him; she thought at the time that she was marrying him for love: her dependent womanliness loved the male, the master. Of a delicate constitution, probably undermined by excessive brain-work, he had died after a short illness. Cecile remembered her sorrow, her loneliness with the two children, as to whom he had already feared that she would spoil them. And her loneliness had been sweet to her, among the clouds of her dreaming....

This portrait—a handsome life-size photograph; a carbon impression dark with a Rembrandt shadow—why had she never had it copied in oils, as she had at first intended? The intention had faded away within her; for months she had not given it a thought; now suddenly it recurred to her.... And she felt no self-reproach or remorse. She would not have the painting made now. The portrait was well enough as it was. She thought of the dead man without sorrow. She had never had cause to complain of him; he had never had anything with which to reproach her. And now she was free; she became conscious of the fact with a great exultation. Free, to feel what she would! Her freedom arched above her as a blue firmament in which new love ascended with a dove’s immaculate flight. Freedom, air, light! She turned from the portrait with a smile of rapture; she thrust her arms above her head as if she would measure her freedom, the width of the air, as if she would go to meet the light. Love, she was in love! There was nothing but love; nothing but the harmony of their souls, the harmony of her handmaiden’s soul with the soul of her god, an exile upon earth. Oh, what a mercy that this harmony could exist between him so exalted and her so lowly! But he must not see her lowliness; she must remain the Madonna, remain the Madonna for his sake, in the martyrdom due to his reverence, in the dizziness of the high place, the heavenly throne to which he raised her, beside himself. She felt this dizziness shuddering about her like rings of light. And she flung herself on her sofa and locked her fingers; her eyelids quivered; then she remained staring before her, towards some very distant point.