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When Elisabeth returned from her dinner at the Mandelbaums’ the look of the things in her room irritated her; she felt as if each piece of furniture was an attack upon her nerves. The furniture stood there, because it couldn’t stand anywhere else; there would be no room for it. Her rooms were like Elisabeth Bleileben’s life; she had chosen her life for herself, but it had stifled and cornered her. At eighteen, passion had caught her in a flood there was no resisting; it had thrown her violently (against the wishes of her relations) into the arms of a tall, handsome Jew with soft coffee-brown eyes, great fluidity of expression, and a belief in himself which had impressed Elisabeth, before she realized that self-confidence is a gift without integrity. It was twenty years since she had this fit of passion, and she had been so horrified by the want of judgement which had plunged her into so shallow a stream that she had resisted every subsequent attack upon her emotions. She felt that she knew love for what it was: a fierce and uneasy impulse that came upon her in gusts of feeling for three or four years after her marriage, and then, appalling and quite final, satiety. She did not want anything more to do with Wilhelm Bleileben. She skipped him daily, as if he were a leading article in a newspaper. Even if something unusual had happened to him, she wouldn’t have had the patience to wade through it word by word. The only emotion which had remained to Elisabeth was an occasional desire to slap the two small flaxen-haired girls, dreadfully colourless and good, with whom Providence had blessed her.

She was brought up to believe that a woman’s sphere is the home, and for several stormy years Elisabeth limited herself to this form of activity. Both she and Wilhelm liked rich, well-cooked food and rooms filled with hard bright furniture. Elisabeth saw that, within the means provided for her, the food was richer, the rooms more violently shining, her own clothes and the children’s more brilliantly dedicated to checks and stripes, than any of her circle could afford. From morning to night Elisabeth’s brilliant eyes, her harsh voice and her pouncing wits harried her servant and transfigured the house. Wilhelm was deeply satisfied with her domesticity; and in time the monumental quality of his self-complacence aggrieved and finally disillusioned Elisabeth. She no longer wanted a model home; besides, when she had thoroughly outstripped all her contemporaries, she began to long for new fields of competition. Wilhelm made no more money than he had made when they were first married; and Elisabeth saw that nothing fresh could be done without money.

It was then that she chanced upon a real brain. Max Cohen, a consumptive cousin of her mother’s, came from Poland to Vienna to start a wholesale business in furs. Elisabeth took trouble over Max Cohen. She found out what he was really like—how much his brain was worth and how far his constitution would be likely to carry him. After several months’ impassioned wrangling she drove her husband into partnership with him. Elisabeth was thirty, and she still believed that a woman’s sphere is the home. But she kept an absorbed eye upon Max and the wholesale furs. The two men talked business with her every evening. They fed on her organizing and enlightening brain, and if her ideas seemed to be produced from the small tartan frocks that she was making for her daughters, they nevertheless inspired transactions between Archangel and New York. Max swiftly acknowledged her powers and revelled in them. Wilhelm took personal credit for all her designs and acknowledged nothing but the tartan frocks.

It was her horror of his pride in her for being an ideal wife and mother that drove Elisabeth into the business world. She learned secretly from Max all the practical handling of their business, bookkeeping, and the laws and evasions of trade. She fitted herself for a business career without Wilhelm’s discovering that she no longer had time to make home-made jam; and when she had done this she half consciously let Max Cohen die. Over and over again she could have saved him. All he needed at first was a winter at Davos; even a reprieve from the harsh winds and dusts of Vienna would have extended his short career. He was sanguine, and Elisabeth played on his hope. He was consumingly ambitious, and she never for a moment failed to keep his ambitions ablaze. They were making more and more money, and she encouraged Max to believe that he was indispensable to the golden flood. She helped him to ignore all his warning symptoms until he suddenly found himself face to face with death. Nothing he could do was any good then, but Elisabeth herself, carefully chaperoned by an old aunt, took him up into the mountains to the best sanatorium in Austria. There he had all the things which could have saved him earlier: well-cooked wholesome food; the scent of pines; the clean air of the snows; Elisabeth’s untiring and quite magnificent nursing. Max Cohen was a brilliantly clever man, but he died believing Elisabeth Bleileben was the best woman in the world and leaving her his share of the fur business. Elisabeth felt the loss of his intellectual companionship deeply; but she now had money of her own.

After a year’s careful investigation, she forced her husband to sell the business at a staggering profit, and made him (with the capital at their disposal) the director of a bank. The war broke out, and Elisabeth launched herself into war charities; her organizing talents gave her immediate influence, and won for her at least an outward association with the most exclusive aristocracy in the world. Whatever she touched succeeded, and ran, if not smoothly (for Elisabeth had a passionate temper and used it with dismaying frequency), swiftly and with pecuniary advantage. She often made social blunders, she often antagonized when she should have pleased, and her fellow workers abhorred and feared her; but she never made any business mistakes. Her accounts were impeccable. When the era of starvation set in, inexplicably (but without a stain on her character) she continued to feed Wilhelm, the little girls and herself upon rich and totally unprocurable food. Perhaps Mandelbaum knew how she managed it; she supplied all her war charities from Mandelbaum’s firm, and after the Breakdown Mandelbaum’s influence secured her husband his startling promotion to the Ministry.

Wilhelm Bleileben, hardly believing in his own good fortune, was tiresomely certain that he deserved it. Elisabeth, whose father had been a pawnbroker (she spoke of him as having been a collector of antiques), was now addressed as ‘Excellenz’ and sat always on the sofa.

She had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams; everything had helped her, from the delicacy of Max Cohen’s constitution to the calamity of the European war; and yet Elisabeth was not satisfied. Something which she could not define eluded her. She had yearnings which the small choked flat at the corner of the Ring did nothing to appease. Something was vaguely wrong with the flat. It smelled too much of food; the collected treasures of a lifetime turned up too often. The two good little girls were as good as ever, but they had become menacingly larger. They took up too much room; so did Wilhelm Bleileben. They were rich enough to afford a larger flat, but wouldn’t a larger flat be simply more of the same thing? Was it so much size she wanted as a difference in the quality of life? At thirty-eight one begins to ask whether what one has got is really what one wants. One asks oneself this question with an uneasiness more urgent than in earlier periods of doubt. Elisabeth had not a contemplative mind, but she was accessible to fact; she seldom deceived herself. She saw that what she had not done she had very little time to do—and that what she was not, with all her magnificent energy and ruthless will, it was improbable that she would become. She had touched the end of her personal resources.

It was in this time of intellectual instability that her husband became unfaithful to her and that Elisabeth first met Otto Wolkenheimb. The first of these two incidents, although it came too late to reawaken her interest in her husband, gave her a queer mental shock. It showed her that she had less power than she thought she had. Elisabeth had been an extraordinarily useful and faithful wife to Wilhelm and, she had supposed, genuinely attractive; and yet it hadn’t been enough for him. Ten years earlier she had been Max Cohen’s friend, never anything more than his friend, but it had been enough for Max Cohen; it had riveted him to his bachelorhood. He said to her once, ‘Elisabeth, I am not in love with you, but you entirely prevent my falling in love with anyone else. After you, I should find any other woman dull.’ Hitherto Elisabeth had not had her virtue greatly tempted. She was too busy to be tempted, and perhaps, she told herself harshly, not attractive enough. She challenged men’s minds before she invaded their senses, and nothing keeps a man’s senses so silent as the attack of an intelligent woman upon his wits.

Elisabeth had known that money was the first thing to procure, and she had procured it; but money did not in itself satisfy Elisabeth; even the power which she obtained by it did not satisfy her. What she wanted (she saw it plainly the night of the Mandelbaums’ dinner) was beauty; a beauty not wholly material, but which she could use materially in her daily life. She wanted before she died to be surrounded by something finer than she had—more delicate and with more taste. She had recognized the charm of Otto Wolkenheimb with a bitter humility. His ease, his intricate lightness, were qualities she hadn’t got. Perhaps Elisabeth might have been content—if it hadn’t been for the war—with a simpler outlook in which virtues were essential and manners were not. But her charities had thrown her with the aristocracy, and she had found in them something which she couldn’t buy. She knew far more about business than they did, but they knew something which wasn’t business and yet which gave them a kind of power. Couldn’t she acquire this secret knowledge? She asked herself the question breathlessly as she sat in her small florid bedroom rejoicing for the moment in its being silent and unshared.

Elisabeth had no continuous privacy. She was forced by want of space and her husband’s traditional horror at marital separation to share a room with him. Out of this led that of the two little girls. She could hear them getting up in the morning and their nightmares if they had any at night. They could hear—with the dreadful superiority of childhood—the bitter altercations which took place with unstudied frequency between their father and mother.

She got up impatiently, and went into the room of Paula and Marie. There they were as usual, round rosy cheeks on white pillows, neatly plaited colourless hair tied with thick white ribbons. She turned up the shaded light on the little night tables and regarded each in turn dispassionately. ‘Ugh! why did I ever have them!’ she exclaimed disgustedly before she clicked off the light and returned to her own room. Elisabeth had been a good mother to Paula and Marie; even now, if they had suffered from anything, she would have swooped to their assistance. In all their childish illnesses she had been an indefatigable nurse; but they gave her no feeling of intimacy. They belonged altogether to their father’s side of the family. Elisabeth had never once surprised wildness in their mild blue eyes nor any desire for adventure in their blameless careers. Their occasional naughtiness took the form of feeble greed or feeble laziness, never of rebellion. But as a rule they were not naughty, they were dreadfully, dismally good and as self-complacent as only good little girls can be. They reminded Elisabeth of her husband, only they were worse because after all Wilhelm was a man. He sometimes swore and once he had boxed his wife’s ears. For half an hour it had nearly reawakened Elisabeth’s affection for him; then he returned with his tail between his legs and apologized. Elisabeth never forgave him his apology.

She sat down on the edge of her bed and swept her husband out of her mind with as much ease as she had disposed of the little girls. Nobody in life held her back from what she meant to do. Nor did she have any conviction of sin. Elisabeth went to church three or four times a year, but she believed in nothing. There was only one real obstacle to her escape from morality; she had been respectable for thirty-eight years. She undressed slowly, looking with a new distaste at the monograms in the centre of the pillowslips, the buttoned sheets and thick red silk eiderdowns. It was difficult to get away from these domestic symbols; they did not seem to go with a life of sin. Elisabeth was not afraid of discovery; two clever people, neither of them impulsive or young, can easily outwit a fool. Everything would go on the same outwardly; no intimacy existed to challenge this new supremacy. There would still be the crowded little flat with its solid silver picture frames and bright maple wardrobes; washstands that made washing a necessity and not an art; and a looking-glass that seemed to accentuate the dinginess of duty on winter mornings; but her mind would no longer be there—it would be safely afloat in large mysterious rooms—rooms in which everything had a history as well as a use, and nothing was definitely bright; soft, silent rooms, through which her own voice—distorted and nerve-racked—had never set its harshness. That was what she wanted, not to be harsh any more, not to be violent or vulgar, but to find a place in her own heart where she could be at peace. She was so often turned out of her imagination by the crass materialism of her daily life. But if this was what she longed for it was also what she feared. Would she, when she entered into this region of delicacy and beauty, be fit for it? Wouldn’t her own ruthlessness and brutality spoil for her the very experience for which she longed? Wasn’t she too old to change? It would be so wonderful not to shout any more, never to tear through intercourse as if it were a crowded street with a flying ‘bus to be caught at the other end. Would she be able not to chivy and bustle her companion, and above all not to sour her own feelings with suspicion and distrust? She wanted so passionately to be happy, happy not only in her circumstances but in her strong and wayward heart. She had been everything else. She had enjoyed grim moments of triumph over the wills of others, she had felt the agitated relief of giving way to paroxysms of anger, but neither her strength nor her achievements had brought her peace. To have a lover—now, when she was conscious of this inner trembling of the heart, this fear of the finish of things! To start afresh upon the path of youth with all the sanity of experience and with the intimacy of a man who could give her what no-one else had ever given her: considerate understanding and delicious friendliness! Was not such an adventure worth any risk? It would take the taste out of these stagnant nineteen years of Wilhelm, his shaving, his teeth-brushing, his dreadful little habits and arrangements, and the possibility of a conversation which often ended in a row, simply because Elisabeth could not get away until she had done her hair. Her married life unrolled itself before her like a limp and ravelled elastic; there was no longer any grip in it. She must let it go—and with it that iron lump of respectability to which she had been for so long pointlessly attached. Let her be young and gay and free as she had never been—and then let Nemesis come in any form it liked! She would not mind Nemesis once she had had her fling! But she could not help asking herself why did Otto want her? Perhaps because the world was new—and its newness belonged to her class and her type? Otto was a survival; he had as much to learn from her as she had to learn from him, and after all it might be the truth when he said that he had never met any woman like her before. The aristocracy were mortally dull. Elisabeth had not seen much of them, but she had seen enough to know that, if they had not belonged to the most exclusive society in the world, no-one would have wanted their company. Their style was perfect, but few of them had anything beyond their style. Elisabeth swore to herself that she would give Otto a good time—if he gave her one! She would throw under his feet the pick of her brain and all the fruits of her experience. Suddenly, inexplicably, Elisabeth buried her head in her fat little second pillow and wept a few very small, very astounding tears. She wept because she was not young, because she wanted beauty, and because she wondered if after all she was not too stiff and too tough to be moulded, as she wished to be moulded, by those delicate fingers which had hitherto known only the most delicate and precious of human substances.