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Rh larger questions, did not understand feminism, was a little afraid of socialism, especially because the poor were so dirty and smelt so horribly. Still, she was charitable, though she was not at all well-off, and often gave money to the poor and dirty, hoping above all that they would wash themselves. And yet she had a fairly logical intelligence, even though she was not cultured, even though she did not ponder deeply on social questions or on art. Now that her vanity was dead, she was a woman of the world, who thought the world tedious and tiresome and felt just a need for sympathy and soft compassion. And only sometimes did the strings within her seem to become more tensely stretched and there sounded through her something like a vague sadness that suddenly made her think and say to herself:

“How small we are and how small everything that we do is! I am growing old now; and what has there been in my existence? Could there be anything else in life? Or is life just like that, for everybody?”

In point of fact, she herself did not know that her heart had never spoken. She had fallen in love with Van der Welcke, at Rome, because of his good looks, in that atmosphere of vanity and drawing-room comedy which had made her, after reading a couple of fashionable French novels, talk sadly about her soul-weariness, parrot-wise, neither knowing nor feeling aught of what she said. She never even thought that there was another sort of love than that which she had felt for Van der Welcke; and,