Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/344

 was my jealousy. As a painter's wife I had besides a special enemy—the model. I have lowered myself to listening at the door when he had models. No wonder I could fight against sleep at insufferable parties in order to keep an eye on him.

"These efforts, unfortunately, were crowned with a terrible success. I had for a long time suspected the blonde lady you saw at Café à Porta. One day, shortly after that evening, I discovered that he had locked himself up with her in the studio, under pretence of having a model. I was so insistent that he confessed. Once having got into a sort of talkative repentance, he poured forth much more than I had suspected. I heard that his unfaithfulness went as far back as the first years, nay, even to the period when he most of all

"No, I cannot write about it.

"How I hate him!"

"April 30th.

"When my child died I grieved dreadfully, but a year had not passed before I looked upon it as a blessing. I have told you so much about my father; you see I feared that I might have been a mother of the same kind. For I felt the same process of petrifying beginning in me, like the one the effect of which I had felt as a child, and which later I have understood.

"There was now no duty to prevent me from retiring into myself. My one and only life was to read our great poets and cultivate music—especially Beethoven and Wagner, whose piano scores I possessed. It was a world after my own heart, and so different from all that I was doomed to come in contact with.

"You know how passionately fond of music I am, but also how strongly it affects my nervous system to play