ardship was neutralized by wealth.
Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the
Midi and 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 dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile
voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of
resentment and perverse antipathy.

She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow
robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the
splendor of the altar.

Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new
physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia." But then he usually felt
the need of a physician's services also.

He was taller than his wife, a brownish, meager, handsome man with dark
circles round his eyes. A doctor had once told him that some persons
never had more than a limited amount of nervous energy; so 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 circulated in
sumptuous bindings. He played Brahms with unusual talent. But certain
colors and perfumes set his nerves on edge, while the sight of blood,
if more than a drop or two, made him feel faint.

Disillusioned from travel, because they had viewed all those fair,
exotic scenes through the blurred auras of their emotional infirmities,
he and his wife returned to their home in New York. There they were
protected against all contact with ugliness, all ignoble influences,
all sources of unhappiness except themselves.

It was a stately old house--for two hundred years the Dellivers and the
Balbians had been stately families--a house always rather dim, its
shadows aglimmer 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 with a gracious weariness, of beautifully
modulated low voices, of noble reticence. Yet all the while the place
quivered from secret transports of anguish.

In this atmosphere Lilla, the child, was like a delicate instrument on
which are recorded, to be ultimately reproduced, myriad vibrations too
subtle for appreciation 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