Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life?  Marriage?  But who desired her?  One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at Kayser’s house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their down-at-the-heel shoes?  To fall from one Bohemian condition to another, from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired dreamers?  Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea.  Through the open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish astonishment.  Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed—­

The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.

In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life, kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the lustful virgin’s eyes.  A glance revealed all.

The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl.  She fell, not through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out of bravado.  Since she was without social position, motherless and isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw off the yoke absolutely.  She broke through her shackles at one bound.  She rebelled!—­

She eloped with this man.

He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and had not the mad woman’s superior intelligence, will, and even her disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere courtesan.

Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece.  How was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her thoughts?  “These diabolical women, nobody knows them, not even those who made them.  A father even would not have detected anything.  The more excuse therefore for an uncle!” So he resumed his musing on elevated art, quieting his displeasure—­for his comrades jeered him—­by the fumes of his pipe.

Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had followed the natural law.  Full liberty for everybody, was still one of Simon Kayser’s pet theories.  Marianne was of age and could dispose of her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endorsement of her conduct.  When she had “sounded all the depths of the abyss,”—­and Kayser pronounced these words while puffing his tobacco—­she would return.  Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called his fireside.

“The fireside of your pipe,” Marianne once remarked to him.