Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/150

126 meaning, value. I felt that I had sacrificed it for ever, and it stirred me to think that I had sacrificed it to so unhappy a being. In my fancies I surrounded my head with a gleam of romance, and it was particularly pleasant to me. I gazed with contempt upon the bourgeois, their wives and daughters whom I met in the street,—how prim and unpleasantly prudent these creatures were! How they would have turned away from me with the disdain proper to respectable ratepayers, if they had known!

And so I set this delicately-made Vlasta on the altar of my soul, pitied her, spoke to her in my thoughts, surrounded her with an ever brighter and ever holier radiance, until, as it often happens with love, I really adored her who was living within me and whom I had created for myself. I at once realised the contradiction in her dual being when I took her the money that evening. She accepted it, she thanked me,—but somehow in a matter-of-fact way that I had not expected. I did not consider that I had sat up two nights with her, that the pitch of her highly-strung mood had to reach slackening point, that it was not possible to wander for ever in the celestial spheres—I took none of this into account, and I was chilled, mortified, disenchanted.

I gave her the money and did not want to detain her. She did not detain me long, pro-