Everything hinges on the
question, do you feel absolutely compelled to do it? Do you feel so
injured, insulted, so indignant that one of you must go, either he or
you? Is that the way the matter stands?"
"I don't know."
"You must know."
Innstetten sprang up, walked to the window, and tapped on the panes,
full of nervous excitement. Then he turned quickly, stepped toward
Wuellersdorf and said: "No, that is not the way the matter stands."
"How does it stand then?"
"It amounts to this--that I am unspeakably unhappy. I am mortified,
infamously deceived, and yet I have no feeling of hatred or even of
thirst for revenge. If I ask myself 'why not?' on the spur of the
moment, I am unable to assign any other reason than the intervening
years. People are always talking about inexpiable guilt. That is
undeniably wrong in the sight of God, but I say it is also in the
sight of man. I never should have believed that time, purely as time,
could so affect one. Then, in the second place, I love my wife, yes,
strange to say, I love her still, and dreadful as I consider all that
has happened, I am so completely under the spell of her loveliness,
the bright charm peculiarly her own, that in spite of myself I feel in
the innermost recesses of my heart inclined to forgive."
Wuellersdorf nodded. "I fully understand your attitude, Innstetten, I
should probably feel the same way about it. But if that is your
feeling and you say to me: 'I love this woman so much that I can
forgive her everything,' and if we consider, further, that it all
happened so long, long ago that it seems like an event in some other
world, why, if that is the situation, Innstetten, I feel like asking,
wherefore all this fuss?"
"Because it must be, nevertheless.
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