Else had never ceased to be
completely enthralled by Robert. During her husband's life-time, she had
imagined that it was friendship, sisterly, almost maternal friendship.
When Herr von der Lehde died, she no longer had any motive for playing a
farce with her own conscience, and she told Robert plainly that she
expected him now to marry her. He was very much surprised and even
slightly amused. Thirty-three years old, at the zenith of his success,
living actually in the midst of a flickering blaze of ardent love, he had
the feeling that it was a very comical idea for a woman who was his
elder, with whom for a decade and a half he had lived on terms of wholly
unobjectionable friendship, and whom he had often unhesitatingly made the
confidante of his love-affairs, suddenly to wish him to marry her. To
return after the lapse of fifteen years to a dish which he had once
tasted with the eagerness of a greedy boy! This was not to be expected.
Love permits no Rip van Winkle adventures. It cannot be taken up where
it was interrupted a generation before. Its drama, whether it is to
close as comedy or tragedy, must be played without long intermissions in
a continuous performance to the end, in order not to become intolerably
tiresome and foolish.
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