At first when, in the desolation of her life, she made advances to me,
this repelled me somewhat. The equestrian performer in Heiberg's Madame
Voltisubito cannot sing unless she hears the crack of a whip. Thus it
seemed to me that her nature could not sing, save to the accompaniment
of all the cart, carriage and riding whips of the mind. But I saw how
unhappy she was, and that the intense strain of her manner was only an
expression of it.
She could not know the beauty of inward peace, and in spite of her
Protestant upbringing she had retained all the unaffectedness and
sincerity of the natural human being, all the obstinate love of freedom,
unmoved in the least by what men call discipline, ethics, Christianity,
convention. She did not believe in it all, she had seen what it resulted
in, and what it covered up, and she passed her life in unmitigated
despair, which was ordinarily calm to all appearance, but in reality
rebellious: what she was enduring was the attempted murder of her soul.
To all that she suffered purely mentally from her life with her husband
in the home that was no home at all, there had of late been added
circumstances which likewise from a practical point of view made
interference and alteration necessary. Her lord and master had always
been a bad manager, in fact worse than that; in important matters,
thoroughly incapable and fatuous.
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