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 [170]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 [171]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 [172]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 subt............