ce then, life had set its mark on
Constance. Often now, as a woman of forty-two, she felt a dull
melancholy in pondering on her life; she let her life, one woman's life,
glide past her gaze once more; she began with her childish years in
India; saw once more the splendour and grandeur of Buitenzorg;
criticized her own vanity during her girlhood at the Hague; saw her
marriage as the great mistake of her life; saw, as the second,
irrevocable mistake of her life, all that had happened with Van der
Welcke.... Her life had been warped beyond remedy. She had gone from
vanity to wantonness, to reckless play-acting with that life, big with
fate, which she had first seen only as a dazzling reflection, a
reflection of mirrors, candles, satin, jewels, titles and orders: the
setting of the play; a little flirtation, a little jesting--not even
always witty--with smart men of the world, refined and elegant in their
dress-clothes, who assumed airs of mysterious importance about the great
affairs of kings and countries, affairs which were settled by just two
or three supermen in Berlin, London or St. Petersburg, while most of the
others, the exquisites, gave weighty decisions on a matter of ceremony,
a visit, a card with or without the corner turned down, a little matter
of etiquette, trivialities around which their whole existence and that
of their wives revolved. She, too, had given weighty decisions in all
these matters: a three weeks' mourning for this royal highness; an eight
days' mourning--very light, with a touch of white--for that royal
highness; and her life was so full of all this ado about nothing that
she had hardly had time to reflect. In Rome, as the wife of the
Netherlands minister, with some pretensions to lead the cosmopolitan
circle which here and there touched upon that of the exclusive Roman
aristocracy, she was so busy with her hairdresser and her tailor, with
shopping in the morning, half-a-dozen visits and a charity _matinee_ in
the afternoon, a Court ball at night, followed by a little supper: so
busy that it affected her health and often left her tired and pale. But
she had grudged none of it, so long as she saw her name mentioned with
the others in the newspapers. And, when, in the midst of all this empty
glamour, in the midst of all this empty bustle, she met Van der Welcke,
the new young secretary of the Netherlands Legation, and, of course, saw
him nearly every day, she had allowed him to make love to her, j