origin and my upbringing and everything that I am, and learn to disown it altogether in order to act as if I were satisfied and happy—that is what I call undignified—that is what I call scandalous, I tell you!”
She broke off, buried her chin once more in her hand, and stared out of the window. He stood before her, his weight on one leg, his hands in his trousers pockets. His eyes rested on her unseeing, for he was in deep thought, and slowly moving his head from side to side.
“Tony,” he said. “You're telling the truth. I knew it all along; but you betrayed yourself just now. It is not the man at all. It is the place. It isn’t this other idiotic business—it is the whole thing all together. You couldn’t get used to it. Tell the truth.”
“Thomas,” she cried, “it is the truth!” She sprang up as she spoke, and pointed straight into his face with her outstretched hand. Her own face was red. She stood there in a warlike pose, one hand grasping the chair, gesticulating with the other, and made a long, agitated, passionate speech that welled up in a resistless tide. The Consul stared at her amazed. Scarcely would she pause to draw breath, when new words would come gushing and bubbling forth. Yes, she found words for everything; she gave full expression to all the accumulated disgust of her Munich years. Unassorted, confused, she poured it all out, one thing after another; she kept nothing back. It was like the bursting of a dam—an assertion of desperate integrity; something elemental, a force of nature, that brooked no restraint.
“It is the truth!” she cried. “Say it again, Thomas! Oh, I can tell you plainly, I am no stupid goose any longer; I know what I have to expect. I don’t faint away at my time of life, to hear that dirty work goes on now and then. I’ve known people like Teary Trieschke, and I was married to Bendix Grünlich, and I know the dissipated creatures there are here in this town. I am no country innocent, I tell you; and the affair with Babette wouldn’t have made me go off the
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