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Updated: June 29, 2025
She looked along the large white form to Gregory at the other end, who was holding down Madame von Marwitz's shoulders. "Go on, Mr. Jardine," she said. "Right up those stairs. She'll calm down now. I've had her like this before." Gregory rose, yet paused, torn by his longing, yet fearful of leaving the old woman with the demoniac creature. But Madame von Marwitz lay as if in a trance.
And her mind at last wandered from the thought of Tante. "Where is Franz?" she asked. The fount of Madame von Marwitz's tears was exhausted. She dried her eyes and cheeks. She blew her nose. She gathered together her thoughts. "Karen," she said, "I will not speak of myself. You say that you do not love me. I can only pray that my love for you may in time win you to me again.
"Oh but my child " Madame von Marwitz's voice trembled in its hope and fear, though she restrained herself from rising and bending to the girl: "did I not make you believe me when I told you that I was mad? Do you not know that the vile words were the weapons I took up against you in my madness? That you gave nothing, Karen?
Miss Woodruff was nowhere to be seen, but a new element pervaded the dingy place, and it hardly needed the presence of four or five richly dressed ladies bearing sheaves of flowers, or that of two silk-hatted impresario-looking gentlemen with Jewish noses, to lead Gregory to infer that the element was Madame von Marwitz's, and that he had, inadvertently, fallen upon the very morning of her departure.
The flawless loyalty of her outward bearing might be but the shield for a deepening hurt. All that he could do was what, in former days and in different conditions, Mrs. Talcott had advised him to do; "hang on," and parry Madame von Marwitz's thrusts.
Madame von Marwitz's glance, as it rested upon the goal of her journey, had in it the look of vast, constructive power, as when, for the first time, it rested on a new piece of music, realized it, mastered it, possessed it, actual, in her mind, before her fingers gave it to the world. So, now, she realized and mastered and possessed the scene that was to be enacted.
Her one small shabby box was put on the top and a very large dressing-case, curiously contrasting in its battered and discoloured magnificence with the box, placed inside; it was a discarded one of Madame von Marwitz's, as its tarnished initials told him.
She, too, had steeled herself in advance against something that she expected to find in him and he was thankful to feel that she wouldn't find it. She was to find him suave and acquiescent; he would consent without a murmur to Madame von Marwitz's plan for the week-end.
To submit was to show himself in Madame von Marwitz's eyes as contemptibly supine; to protest was to appear in Karen's as meanly petty. His reflections were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone and when he went to it Karen's voice told him that she was spending the evening with Tante, who was ill, and that she would not be back till ten.
"Of course; whenever you want to; whenever she wants to," said Gregory, leaning his hands on the back of his chair and tilting it a little while he smiled the fullest acquiescence. Madame von Marwitz's eyes brooded on him. "That is kind," she said gently. "Oh no, it isn't," Gregory returned. "I think," said Madame von Marwitz, becoming even more gentle, "that you misunderstand my meaning.
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