"I want to die," I said, anxious to put an end to our conversation. "I am sick of life; the past is a tangled skein which I cannot unravel. It is time that my eyes closed for ever—that the curtain fell!"
I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it is the anthithesis of love. I hated her because I loved her.
Poor Marie! Her remorse, her unrest, her dark moods were rooted in that shady past. In putting old events by the side of new ones I had the key to the quarrels between mother and daughter, brutal quarrels, frequently verging on violence. I could understand Marie's hitherto incomprehensible words, "I could kick my mother!"
Marie struggled and fought as if she had been caught in a trap. On her first attempt to hoodwink me she was severely taken to task by the women. For the first time in my life I found the fair sex entirely on my side; henceforth she had to play second fiddle.
I loved her more than ever at the thought that now she would belong entirely to me and her children.
"Life was sometimes good, evil every now and then, but the best thing came last. I solved the problem as well as I could, and it was not easy, although the rich man found that it was not enough. But we did not understand one another. It is a pity that men are not meant to understand one another."
"You, whose every desire has been fulfilled, who possess the best of all things Life has to bestow, why are you discontent?"
I wanted to deceive myself, live in a world of my own, which I could create at my pleasure.
"Certainly, my dear," I agreed, "but for all that our actions do not fail to draw their consequences after them. I admit that there is no such thing as sin, because there is no personal God; nevertheless we are responsible to those we wrong. There may be no sin in the abstract, but crime will exist as long as there is a Law. We may smile at the theological conception of it, but vengeance or, rather, retribution, remains a fact, and the aggressor never escapes."
Carried away for the moment by her memories, she told me that she had made the acquaintance of an engineer on the steamer, an enlightened, up-to-date man, who had convinced her that there was no such thing as sin in the abstract, and that circumstances and destiny alone were responsible for all happenings.
