Sacrifice

, left their child a legacy other than the fortune tha

rity. Reclining on a couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an exquisite sophistication. Then, letting the book slip from her fingers, she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a seraglio on the Bosphorous. At night, if

y the window in a charming negligée, paler than a camellia, hardly

somehow, s

the Riviera blue. In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse cries of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed. In Switzerland, as da

wamis in yellow robes, and by sitting in cathedrals

for new physicians-"specialists in neurasthenia." But the

he was always trying to conserve his share, as if the prolongation of his idle life were very important. Yet he was not dull. He had written several essays, on classical subjects, that were privately

of their emotional infirmities, he and his wife returned to their home in New York. There they were protect

r with richness, and here and there a beam of light illuminating some flawless, precious object. It was a house of silent servants, of faces imprinted w

iation by the five senses. Or, one might say, the small, apparent form that this man and this woman had created in their likeness-as it were a fatal sublimatio

father's face was distorted by a spasm of re

ght have we

racing aestheticism, at another fleeing back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too wea

namely, superstition; and this superstition was sharpened by the u

had an influence on one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman slipped into the sanctums of t

presently find peace. They all promised him

of trains in the night, which he and his wife hardly hear

y blossomed with white roses. Next morning the orphan was taken aw