She could not bear to hear him speak about her gifts to him. It is true that she had brought him her pure soul when she gave herself to him. He could never forget it, and he measured, as it were, the depth and strength of her love by this fact, for she had given him the purity of her youth—of twenty years.
She had kept it as a white bridal dress, unused, unstained, and in her longing and anxiety lest she should never come to wear it, in despair over her cold solitude and her inability to love, she had clung to it, crumpled it, and soiled it with her thoughts. Was not any one who had lived the life of love purer than she, who had been brooding and spying and longing until all her faculties were paralysed by that longing?
She had given herself—and yet what a slight impression it had made on her. She was not altogether cold; sometimes she was carried away by his passion, but she feigned passion while she was cool, and when she was away from him she scarcely remembered it at all. Yet, to please him, she wrote of a longing which did not exist—yes, she had been feigning, feigning all the time before his honest passion.
There was a time when she had not been a hypocrite, or if she had lied to Gert she had also lied to herself. She had felt a storm in herself; it was perhaps pity for him and his fate and rebellion against her own—why should they both be harried by a longing for something impossible?—and in the growing anxiety for where it all would lead, she had rejoiced that she loved him, for she was forced to fall into the arms of this man, however mad she knew it to be.
She would sit in the tram when she left him of an evening, looking at all the sleepy, placid faces of the people, and rejoicing that she came from her lover—that he and she were whirled by the tempest of their fate. They had been driven into it and did not know where they were going, and she was proud of her fate because unhappiness and darkness threatened.
And now she was sitting here only wishing for it to end, planning a journey abroad to escape from it all. She had accepted an invitation to stay at Tegneby with Cesca to prepare the break. It was better for Gert that he was alone—if she could manage to end the life between them now, she could have done him some good.