Was there anything
spiritual in their marriage? Was there?"
"No, not any longer! Her love was dead! He had killed it when he
renounced his splendid faith in--the emancipation of women."
Matters became more and more unbearable. The green forester began to
look to his fellow-foresters for companionship and gave up thinking of
the goods department and its way of conducting business, matters which
he never understood.
"You don't understand me," she kept on saying over and over again.
"No, I don't understand the goods department," he said.
One night, or rather one morning, he told her that he was going
botanising with a girls' class. He was teaching botany in a girls'
school.
"Oh! indeed! Why had he never mentioned it before? Big girls?"
"Oh! very big ones. From sixteen to twenty."
"H'm! In the morning?"
"No! In the afternoon! And they would have supper in one of the
outlying little villages."
"Would they? The head-mistress would be there of course?"
"Oh! no, she had every confidence in him, since he was a married man.
It was an advantage, sometimes, to be married."
On the next day she was ill.
"Surely he hadn't the heart to leave her!"
"He must consider his work before anything else.
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