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The Countess Rosalie Zalfy sat in the corner of Otto Wolkenheimb’s sofa and wondered what was the matter with him. She had often sat in that particular corner before; for three years in fact she had sat there more often and with more pleasure than anywhere else; but she had never before had to wonder what was the matter with Otto.

Life was very simple for Rosalie; she loved horses, smart men and chocolates, and she had always had them. She was a beautiful horsewoman and as pretty as if she were paid for it. She came from an excellent family, and looked barely respectable. Her husband had an easy nature, and tastes that he was very glad she had no wish to share. They gave each other a great dead of margin and used all of it up.

Rosalie was as fond of Otto Wolkenheimb as she had ever been of any one. He gave her good horses to ride, Russian furs, occasionally jewels, and constantly large boxes of Gerbaud chocolates—the best in the world. He never asked anything of Rosalie except that she should be good-humoured and well-dressed. Otto disliked large-hearted sympathetic women, and if it were a question of wit, he had enough for two. To have had an intimacy with an intelligent woman would have bored him very much. What he liked was to find out other people’s foibles while he himself remained hidden behind an attractive mask; he had no wish to correct any of the weaknesses he discovered, but he had every intention of profiting by them. It cannot be said that Otto was deeply in love with Rosalie; but until now she had been exactly what he wanted. Now she was too expensive. Eugen had gone into all his affairs most carefully and had told him briefly but firmly that Rosalie must go. She must go unless she would stay without horses; and it was going to be a little difficult to put this condition to Rosalie, who had never in her life done without anything that she wanted.

Rosalie felt already the chill of sacrifice in the air. She nestled deeper into the cushions, smoked a little nervously and wondered if her new hat, which was composed of two humming birds and a piece of cerise velvet, was all that she had supposed when she bought it. ‘You are very silent, dear Otto,’ she said at last, ‘and you go up and down, up and down in front of me as if you were waiting for a train. Since I have been here for at least five minutes, it would be prettier of you to behave as if the train had arrived!’ Otto laughed a little impatiently. ‘Everything, my treasure,’ he observed, ‘comes when you come. If I am a little restless it is natural enough; because, with equal certainty, everything goes when you go!’ ‘But I am not going to go until to-morrow morning,’ Rosalie reminded him. ‘Heinrich is in the country, and I am supposed to be consulting a doctor at Baden. I would take off my hat, but it is so pretty on, or at least I had supposed so before I came here! Outdoors it is snowing and dark, and, oh, how one envies all those wicked Allies who have their own limousines—the brutes—and need not take dirty street trams and spoil their shoes in puddles! Look at my feet.’ Rosalie had beautiful little feet, and Conrad, on her arrival, had made her shoes cleaner than her own servant had made them before she started out. They were hardly feet to look at dispassionately, quite apart from the melon-coloured silk stockings which rose for some distance above them; and yet Otto insulted her by looking at them dispassionately. ‘When will you be able to buy a car?’ Rosalie went on after this unsuccessful pause. ‘Talk to me about it first, dear Otto. I have so many ideas! Are you going to get some horses over from England next Spring? I suppose that now everything will be a little easier, a little more amusing, unless these wretched Socialists spoil all our fun? It was a pity, wasn’t it, about the Kaiser abdicating? I shouldn’t have thought you would have let him, Otto darling. It gave me quite a shock! But it won’t stop the racing, will it?’ As a rule Otto thoroughly enjoyed Rosalie’s heartlessness. It seemed to him ideal to possess a woman who, in addition to looking like a doll, had exactly as little feeling. Perhaps he would have enjoyed it to-day if he had not had to appear before her in a less attractive light than usual. When he answered her it was with a very slight edge to his voice, natural in a husband but regrettable in a lover. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that since we last met there have been one or two slight changes, and I am afraid you will find their results tiresome. Money, for instance—that very coarse object about which we never speak—any more, I suppose, than roses talk about manure?—is going to be what business men call “tight.” I don’t see any prospects of discussing cars with you, or even fresh horses. In fact I fear what we shall have to discuss is getting rid of the horses I already possess!’ Rosalie laid down her cigarette. ‘My dear Otto,’ she exclaimed, ‘not the horses!’ She sat up straight, uncrossed her melon-coloured legs and looked perfectly serious. ‘Socialists,’ Otto continued, ‘a body of people you so inappropriately describe as wretched—don’t like horses except for purposes of traction; and as we are to live under a Socialist régime it will be unpopular not to appear at least to sympathize with their absence of taste.’ ‘But, Otto darling,’ cried Rosalie, in horror, ‘why should we sympathize at all with anything we don’t like? Sympathy is such a bore! Besides I really don’t think it would be quite right to please Socialists. Heinrich says the only way to stand Democracy is to go into the country and keep quiet with what you’ve got. But I thought we would manage to keep half our flat going in town too, and do a little racing while Heinrich stays in the country and sends us up butter and birds. Don’t you think that would be an excellent plan? Perhaps you have heard there is to be a Reparations Commission sent over here by the Allies—quite nice people some of them—and what I thought was, they can give dances and dinners and all that sort of thing, and we can—well—we can go to them, can’t we? We really ought to forgive our enemies, oughtn’t we—when there’s no point in not doing so? You know English people so well too, you could easily get me some for the other half of our flat—fortunately we have two kitchens—and probably I could dress on what we made out of them. That would be an immense economy! It’s disgusting having foreigners here of course, but since they are bound to come we may as well make use of them, mayn’t we?’ ‘The prospect of their usefulness has not escaped me,’ replied Otto a little dryly. ‘But, Rosalie, hitherto I have had a career. I haven’t troubled you with it since there has been no reason at all why I should. My career lay in my hand, as it were, and gave me plenty of leisure to spend in your delightful company. Now I am without anything, so that I must start a fresh career for myself, and it will take practically all the time I have to arrive anywhere.’ Rosalie took up her cigarette with a trembling hand. ‘To arrive?’ she asked. ‘To arrive? I don’t understand. What need has a Wolkenheimb to arrive?’ ‘None, if the world belonged, as it did once, to ourselves,’ said Otto a little wearily, ‘and every need if it belongs, as it does, alas! at the present moment, to the “wretched Socialists” and the intelligent Jews.’ Otto spoke indifferently, and he had never spoken indifferently to Rosalie before. He usually kissed her often, looked at her continuously, and told her in a great variety of ways that she was adorable. When they wanted to be serious, which happened very seldom, they spoke about the two most serious things in the world—clothes and horses. Otto knew practically everything about those two subjects, and what he knew about other less serious subjects he kept to himself.

Rosalie realized that he was a very distinguished and brilliant person; that was what made him so nice to go about with. People looked at his dome-like brow, his high cheek-bones and remarkably luminous brown eyes; and everybody looked again. Otto wasn’t handsome, but he was impressive; so impressive, and so well did he carry what height he had that every one thought of him before they thought of any one else in the room. It was not until they said, ‘Graf Wolkenheimb was there,’ that they went, on to say who else was; and now he had begun to talk about not having leisure and making a career. Had he begun to tire of her? Rosalie glanced across at one of Otto’s old Venetian mirrors. She saw with satisfaction her fluffy hair and the perfect angle of the humming-bird hat, her large blue eyes, made up, imperceptible she was sure, at the corners, her cheeks perfectly pink, perfectly smooth, and neither too full nor too spare. Her mouth was her strongest point—it was exquisite. Later on it would probably go down at the corners, but it would be safe for another ten years; and her teeth were the finest in Wien. The mirror showed her a reassuring sight, and if Otto had tired of her it was entirely his own fault. ‘But what shall we do without horses?’ she gasped. ‘Otto, my dear, we simply can’t live without horses!’ The door opened and Conrad appeared, very flurried and unhappy, ushering in another woman. They were both astounded. In all the three years of their intimacy nothing like it had ever happened before. It was so astounding that Rosalie leaped to the conclusion that Otto had intended it. What made it worse, what made it a million times worse, was that she knew the other woman. The Princess Eugénie Felsör was Otto’s cousin. She had a perfect right to come to Otto’s rooms at five o’clock in the afternoon; and her reputation was so unblemished that if she had any particular intention in doing so, it was almost certain to be innocent. If there was one quality that Countess Zalfy disliked in other women more than another, it was innocence; and innocence allied to good looks she positively loathed.

Five years ago Eugénie had been the most beautiful woman at Court. She had lost the bloom and roundness of youth and health, but the lines of her head and face retained their haunting charm. She looked now like a work by an old Master in which the colour has faded but the grace remains. All her life was in her deep velvety eyes. They were dark hazel in colour and made a golden light between the shadow of her long lashes. But as she came into the firelit room out of the cold air, she looked as if there hadn’t been any War to fade and blanch her beauty. Her eyes were brilliant with anxiety, her white wan cheeks flushed with colour. Otto darted forward and kissed her hands one after the other. He made her sit down at the other end of the sofa. ‘You know,’ he said, turning to Rosalie, ‘the Countess Zalfy of course? Her husband has left her here for an hour to cheer me up while he did a little business.’ ‘Of course we know each other,’ said Rosalie coldly, ‘though one never sees the Princess now that she has so devoted herself to good works.’ Rosalie nearly sniffed, and snapped her little pearl-like teeth together after she had spoken. She would have to stay now till Eugénie left, so that Heinrich’s non-existence could be left securely in the clouds; and she had just made up her mind that unless Otto relented she wouldn’t stay. She didn’t want to stay, she hated Eugénie, and while Eugénie was there she couldn’t take any satisfactory means of finding out if Otto would relent or not. ‘It is years since I have seen you, Eugénie, years,’ said Otto, with a feeling in his voice he was unable for a moment to disguise. It was entirely his own fault that he had not seen Eugénie for so long, but it was nicer for both of them that it should seem hers. ‘And yet,’ said Eugénie, smiling, ‘I have remained always in the same place.’ She was not going to have any niceness beyond what she couldn’t help; what she couldn’t help was the exquisite niceness of her presence. Otto was the least embarrassed of the three. Eugénie had come in very appropriately, and though Conrad was going to receive the sharpest rebuke of his career after the two ladies had gone, no harm had been done by his inadvertence. It was a delightful situation to watch two such beautiful women hating each other on the same sofa. One, the woman Otto had always loved, but in the depths of his heart feared—feared too much ever to marry—and the other, so successfully married to some one else and ministering to his lighter tastes with the whole of her very small, very neatly arranged heart. Rosalie had been on the point of melting into tears—they had now frozen. Eugénie had been on the point of making a difficult emotional appeal—she couldn’t make it at present. And Otto was profoundly glad that she couldn’t make it. He had not had to raise a finger to prevent these disagreeable manifestations from taking place. By their mutual presence, these ladies were preventing each other from causing Otto anything but intense entertainment. As if to make everything perfect, Conrad had the sense to bring up Eugen. If Eugen was surprised at the company before him, he did not show it; imperturbably he kissed the hands of Eugénie whom he adored, and of Rosalie whom he disliked; of the two he was slightly more cordial in the greeting to Rosalie; that was because no-one in the world was ever to guess what he felt for Eugénie. Nor indeed had any one guessed it, not even Eugénie herself; though she had an instinct which told her that whatever she said or did would please Eugen, even things which in any one else would have displeased him. Tea came in and little cakes, more magnificent than any Eugénie had seen for years. She dared not eat them, but she drank, with a strange sensation of delight, the unaccustomed tea. She was glad that Otto wandered away with Rosalie to the other side of the room. ‘Eugen,’ she said quickly, ‘you are not surprised to see me here, after what Franz told me? I asked for leave from the hospital—I had to come.’ ‘I am not surprised certainly,’ said Eugen, systematically beginning on Schinken-Brötchen, ‘nothing at my age surprises me, but I am perhaps a little sorry since I guess your errand to be useless, and fear therefore that it will be painful.’ ‘Oh, I hope it will not be useless,’ said Eugénie nervously; ‘only I cannot speak to Otto before the Countess. I hope her husband will soon be here to pick her up, he has left her with Otto for an hour while he had business to see to.’ ‘So,’ murmured Eugen, continuing with a Sardinen Butter-Brot. He knew that Rosalie’s husband was at that moment in Styria. ‘Since you wish it I will take her to him immediately. I know where he is likely to be found.’ ‘Dear Eugen, you know everything,’ murmured Eugénie gratefully, ‘only of course I am very angry with you; you must realize that I am too angry to bear it! What Franz told me of you yesterday is both unbearable and unbelievable—that you should intrigue with a Jew Politician! I cannot, I will not believe it!’ Eugen chose a marron glacé dispassionately before he replied, then he said, ‘Eugénie, do not believe what is unbelievable and do not bear what is unbearable. How very sensible of you to wear that ermine wrap! Sensible, I mean for your purpose here; and how extremely dangerous to wear it in the streets! Do you not know that it is likely to be torn off your back by one of our delightful new citizens who object to fur unless it is displayed upon their own persons?’ Eugénie blushed. ‘I had nothing else,’ she explained, ‘except my hospital uniform, and I am glad I did not wear that!’ ‘So am I, so is Otto, and without doubt if the question were put to her, so would be the Countess Zalfy,’ Eugen gravely assured her. ‘But nevertheless please wait here until I have deposited the Countess with her husband. You will quarrel with Otto and refuse his escort home, but you will not quarrel with me, and I shall therefore have that pleasure.’ ‘But why should I not quarrel with you?’ Eugénie asked earnestly, ‘seeing that I consider your conduct far, far worse than Otto’s? Otto has the excuse that he is ambitious! You have none!’ ‘Because you cannot quarrel with a person whose devotion to you is as complete as his self-control,’ replied Eugen calmly, ‘and if you will think for a moment you will remember that I am now an old man, forty years old, very humble in spirit, and never lifting my eyes higher than my head. All these years, however, I have had two marked qualities: I have served my friends and I have punished, when it was within my means, my enemies. These two characteristics you will not expect me at my advanced age to change. Therefore you will not quarrel with me. You will say, “Eugen, your conduct is outrageous. When will you come to spend the evening with us?” ’ ‘Franz has quarrelled with you,’ Eugénie observed uncertainly. ‘Franz has quarrelled with himself,’ Eugen corrected her. ‘A malady incidental to the young. Otto and I have already overlooked it. Countess Zalfy,’ he added, slightly raising his voice, ‘I am desolated to deprive Otto of your society, but your husband, whom I ran across just now at the Club, promised me the privilege of escorting you to him at six o’clock. I told him I was coming here, and he suggested the pleasure of your company as a reward.’ Rosalie tossed her head. She knew that Eugen knew as well as she did where her husband was; her little face had sharpened and her blue eyes had a hard sparkle in them. As she approached Eugénie this sparkle became menacing. ‘I will not then wait any longer for my husband,’ she said. ‘The Princess, having no occasion to wait for hers, will no doubt have a longer and perhaps more entertaining visit than my own. I must confess I do not find Graf Wolkenheimb quite as amusing as usual!’ Eugénie met the angry eyes looking down at her, with calm disdain, and looked away again in silence. She was seated, and Rosalie was standing, and yet it did not seem to the two men watching them as if Rosalie were looking down. ‘The fault is of course mine,’ said Otto coldly. ‘I apologize profoundly for my straying wits, Countess; such a state of things, let us hope, will not occur again!’ Rosalie looked back at him while Eugen held the door open for her. ‘The opportunity for them to stray is not likely to occur again,’ she said in a clear hard voice. This was the end. Otto gave a sigh of relief, as the door (by some arrangement of Eugen’s, which may have consisted in pulling the Countess through it) closed after her. Otto had escaped a scene, but he disliked excessively even scraping the edge of one in the presence of Eugénie. ‘I am sorry,’ he said gravely, ‘that the Countess Zalfy was so impertinent to you. I fancy she was put out about something, and she has rather less self-control than a spoiled child.’ ‘It does not matter,’ said Eugénie indifferently. ‘I don’t care in the least what people do or say—when they are not dear to me; but, Otto, when they are dear to me—I care very deeply.’ ‘We are extraordinarily unlike then,’ said her cousin, approaching the sofa, ‘in that as in other ways; I, for instance, care extremely what the world in general thinks of me, and I do not yield at all readily to the opinions of those one or two people to whom I am personally attached.’ ‘Yet you used to care for my opinion?’ said Eugénie, fixing him with her deep velvety eyes, eyes in which a man could plunge beyond his depth. Otto plunged, and found it difficult to come up again afterwards. ‘If I had ever held your good opinion,’ he said at length, ‘I might be afraid of losing it.’ ‘You held more than my good opinion,’ said Eugénie in a low voice, ‘you held my heart. No! no! stay where you are, Otto! The time of which I speak is over; but I have my memories. They are very dear to me. I am here to-day to fight for my memories!’ Otto had sprung towards her, but at her words he turned away and walked to the window which looked across at the Votiv Kirche. The Square was wet and full of dim shrouded lights moving swiftly to and fro. Otto stood with his back to Eugénie. It was so easy to make light love to a woman you didn’t care for, so utterly impossible to make it to the woman you loved. Her memories! What about his own? Eugénie had been his, at a word, when she was seventeen. She was the most beautiful creature in all their circle of beautiful women and gallant men; so lovely that it was impossible to forget the delicate glow and texture of her youth; and he had been idiotic enough to let her go to a man twice her age. He hadn’t wanted at twenty-five to settle down and have a home, to hold himself in, and put down his racing stable; and he had thought Eugénie would have seen afterwards that, since he had always loved her, it was perfectly within their power to make the best of things. Eugénie had, however, been inaccessible; though Otto had explained to her that her marriage was just the way in which inaccessibility could most easily be dispensed with. He had made passionate love to her; and Eugénie had ordered him out of the house. These were his memories. Since her husband’s death they had met again, but Eugénie wore unbecoming clothes, and was immersed in a children’s hospital. Otto disliked diseases, and people who had anything to do with them made him nervous. She was free now, free and inflexible. The tones of her voice made his heart beat as if he were a boy again; and he dared not look at her lips. ‘I don’t know what you mean by love,’ he said, without turning round, ‘it’s charming of you, of course, to say I had your heart, but I don’t think at the time when I asked for it, you made this fact very obvious to me!’ ‘Oh, Otto,’ said Eugénie, ‘but you knew!’ Otto had to turn round, he had to come back to her with a sigh of angry despair, and sit where the torture of her eyes could play on him. He thought it distinctly unfair that Eugénie should have had, in addition to her beauty, a voice that pierced his heart. ‘You must excuse me, Eugénie,’ he said as coldly as he could; ‘if I had known then, it would only have annoyed me a little more intensely than it annoys me now to be told of it. Women’s hearts have never been of the slightest consequence to me, when they withheld the favours that should accompany their hearts. I don’t want to be a brute, but you are trying a man who is a brute very hard.’ ‘Dearest Otto’, Eugénie murmured with the dangerous humility of a proud woman, ‘no harder than all these cruel years I’ve been tried myself: I am not silly. I am not a prude. I gave you all I could, all I dared! When you tried to make me break my word to Rudolph I had to send you away; but with you went all the joy of my life: and all the joy of my life is with you still!’ ‘Please, Eugénie, please,’ Otto said brokenly; ‘how singularly little joy you must have had, and how singularly base you make me feel!’ ‘But you aren’t base,’ she murmured, laying her thin hand on his; ‘oh, Otto, it is because I know you aren’t base that I came here to-day. I—I am rather a proud woman generally, but I don’t care about my pride now. I only care to keep what I have in my heart. It isn’t, dearest, that I want you to love me again. I know you can’t, that’s all over now—I am an old woman who has lost a child and who lives on, I don’t know how—until she can rejoin him. It is only if you do this thing, if you lower your name and betray our honour—why, then I shall have lost all the romance I ever had—and you know, Otto, it can hurt more to lose a little, if that is all you have to lose, than to lose a great deal.’ Otto said without looking at her, ‘Take your hand away, Eugénie!’ She obeyed him when, if she had disobeyed him, she might have won him. Otto felt free to speak now; but he kept his eyes away from her face. ‘Of what do you accuse me?’ he asked lightly. ‘You are an incarnate reproach, but so far you have failed to mention what you are reproaching me for.’ Eugénie was silent for a moment; she knew Otto too well not to realize that he would outwit her in any argument; her only chance was to move him into sincerity. ‘I do not know anything about business,’ she said at last, ‘but I know what a man’s honour is. Can you keep yours safe if you mix in commercial affairs with a bad Jew?’ ‘You refer to my good friend Mandelbaum perhaps?’ Otto asked her. ‘We are all obliged to associate with Jews now. If I am not mistaken your Doctor Jeiteles, of whom you hold so high an opinion and for whom you work in your hospital, is a Jew?’ ‘He is a good man,’ said Eugénie simply. ‘I work very gladly under him. Can you work gladly and honourably under this Mandelbaum?’ ‘I do not work under him,’ replied Otto, biting his lips with annoyance, ‘I work with him, or at least I propose to work with him. There is a distinction, and I think that I am the best judge of my honour.’ ‘That is why I came to you,’ agreed Eugénie; ‘I knew you to be the best judge of your honour, and you are content? There is nothing in this association that sticks in your throat?’ ‘The old world is finished,’ said Otto impatiently; ‘our old standards must crumble with it. I have decided to let mine crumble. If you ask me, am I doing to-day what I should have done yesterday—no! I am not! If I did I should lose Trauenstein and become a beggar. Is that what you wish?’ ‘It is not very terrible to be poor, Otto,’ Eugénie said humbly. ‘One works hard every day. One finds—it is curious!—one finds as much happiness as there is. I had not thought it possible; one thinks too much of money when one has it—now that I do not have it any more, I find that one ceases to trouble about many things. Of course to have nothing at all would be terrible; but you are so clever, so much cleverer than we are, that I think you would not find you had nothing even if you had to give up Trauenstein and work as we do. Perhaps you might work on the estate—and save it? Franz believes there is money to be found in working it?’ ‘Trauenstein is heavily mortgaged,’ said Otto dryly; ‘I must pay the interest on it out of what I make, and that is why it is necessary for me to make what I can. One does not develop an estate without capital.’ Eugénie said nothing. She sat there patiently looking at him with eyes full of love and trust. She believed that stripped of all he possessed Otto would be a great man; she did not know that Otto was what he possessed. His passion, his pride, his life itself, had passed into his possessions; he was no more able to conceive of life without them than Franz could have conceived of life without honour, or Eugénie life without love. ‘What you ask is impossible,’ he said after a pause. ‘I must live as best I can, Eugénie. I know what I am doing; Eugen also knows it and has accepted it. I do not say it is fine or noble, but it is necessary. If you and Franz dislike it too much you can always refuse to know me. A man can only act by his own eyes. I think that mine see further than yours. But it is natural for you to take your brother’s view of my actions.’ ‘I do not take Franz’s view,’ replied Eugénie; ‘that is why I came here. I wanted to find out your own. That is what one judges people by, is it not—when one loves them? What hurts me is that I feel you know that you are doing wrong and that you would be happier if you did not do it.’ ‘What makes you suppose that?’ asked Otto with a quick glance at her. ‘Do rags strike you as the kind of thing I should be happy in?’ ‘We should all be together,’ said Eugénie under her breath—‘whatever happened we should be together. Long ago, Otto, just such a chance came to you—forgive me—you know how you chose! We broke our hearts over it when it was too late. I was too proud to plead with you then—now I have forgotten my pride. I would not let it stand in my way to-day. I said, “I cannot let him be unhappy again”.’ Otto covered his eyes with his hand to shut out her face and said, ‘Must we continue this discussion? It is profoundly painful to us both, and since as you tell me you no longer desire my love, it seems to lead nowhere. May we not take it for granted that I am infamous, faithless and of course heartless—and then would you mind going away? Eugénie! Eugénie, have pity! I can’t stand this any longer! If you go on sitting there—I’m damned if I can stand it! And I’m not going to give in!’ Eugénie rose, half frightened, half triumphant, to her feet. It was incredible to her that Otto still cared, and yet if he did not care, why was he so moved? Why did he cover his eyes with his hands so that he could not see her face? Why did she herself feel the old enchanting cruel excitement catch at her heart again? It caught at her heart; but it did not move her inflexible judgement. She loved Otto, loved him as perhaps in her young and innocent life she had not known how to love, but her spirit loved him more than her senses. At a touch he would have been at her feet—and she did not touch him. She murmured instead, ‘But, Otto, then—if you care for me, you cannot possibly stoop to this baseness?’ ‘Why do you talk of such things?’ he said between his teeth. ‘I only know that I am not going to alter my life for you, and that if you stand there another minute, I shall never let you go.’

Silence settled between them, dangerous with memories. Their wills fought each other while their senses dragged them towards surrender. Eugénie knew her only safety was in flight, and yet to leave Otto was like destroying a part of herself. Otto knew nothing but passion and the fear of Eugénie’s eyes if he let himself go. It was the only fear he had ever had; yet he knew that it would not hold him for long. Eugénie spoke at last, ‘No—if you will not change, I cannot,’ she said in a low breaking voice. ‘Then go! said Otto without looking at her. The door opened and Eugénie saw Eugen standing in the passage. Without a word, as if Otto had been ill, she stepped quietly from his side with her finger on her lips and joined Eugen. Eugen looked past her at the bowed figure of his friend and, drawing her gently into the passage, closed the door. ‘What singularly cruel things’, he observed dispassionately, ‘good women do to men!’