“And contempt?” she asked, stopping me.

“Did you despise me?” I exclaimed.

“Let us say no more on this subject,” she replied.

“No, let me say all!” I replied, in the excitement of my intolerable pain.  “It concerns my life, my whole being, my inward self; it contains a secret you must know or I must die in despair.  It also concerns you, who, unawares, are the lady in whose hand is the crown promised to the victor in the tournament!”

Then I related to her my childhood and youth, not as I have told it to you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose wounds are still bleeding.  My voice was like the axe of a woodsman in the forest.  At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound, bristling with their anguish like branches robbed of their foliage.  I described to her in feverish language many cruel details which I have here spared you.  I spread before her the treasure of my radiant hopes, the virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual winter.  When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings, related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and divine with a single sentence.

“We have had the same childhood!” she said, turning to me a face on which the halo of the martyrs shone.

After a pause, in which our souls were wedded in the one consoling thought, “I am not alone in suffering,” the countess told me, in the voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when sons were wanted.  She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to her mother’s side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world of school and college life.  My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant faultfinding, always intolerable to high-strung natures which do not shrink before death itself but die beneath the sword of Damocles; sometimes by the crushing of generous impulses beneath an icy hand, by the cold rebuffal of her kisses, by a stern command of silence, first imposed and then as often blamed; by inward tears that dared not flow but stayed within the heart; in short, by all the bitterness and tyranny of convent rule, hidden to the eyes of the world under the appearance of an exalted motherly devotion.  She gratified her mother’s vanity before strangers, but she dearly paid in private for this homage.  When, believing that by obedience and gentleness she had softened her mother’s heart, she opened hers, the tyrant only armed herself with the girl’s confidence.  No spy was ever more traitorous and