Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- (XX) -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XX
BIANKA is all grey. Her dusky complexion contains, as if in solution, the ingredient of burnt out ash. I think that the touch of her hand must surpass everything conceivable.
Whole generations of breeding inhere in her disciplined blood. That resigned subjection is touching, under the dictates of tact, bearing witness to conquered contrariness, suppressed rebellions, her quiet sobbing in the night and the outrages inflicted upon her pride. In her every movement, full of goodwill and sad grace, she accustoms herself to the prescribed forms. She does nothing beyond the necessary, and her every gesture is sparingly measured out, a pose just barely struck, entered into it without enthusiasm, as if merely out of a passive sense of obligation. Bianka draws her premature experience, her knowledge of all things, from deep inside those victories. Bianka knows everything, but she derives no joy from that knowledge. Her knowledge is serious and full of sadness, and her mouth is closed over it in a line of absolute beauty, and her eyebrows are drawn with severe accuracy. No, she does not derive from her knowledge any presumption to indulgent laxity, softness or profligacy. Quite the reverse. It is as if that truth into which her sad eyes are gazing is to be borne only by intense attention, only by the most precise compliance with form. And in that unerring tact, in that loyalty to form, there is a whole sea of sadness and arduously surmounted pain.
And yet, although broken by form, she has emerged victorious from beneath it. But with what sacrifice has that triumph been achieved!
When she walks, slender and straight, who can say what sort of pride she bears so simply in the forthright rhythm of her gait — whether it is her own conquered pride, or the triumph of the principles to which she has succumbed.
But for all that, when she casts a look, a direct, sad lifting of her eyes — suddenly she knows everything. Youth has not protected her from insight into the most mysterious things. Her quiet temperament is her consolation for long days of sobbing and tears. That is why her eyes are so sunken, why there is a moist, fervid glow in them, and that purpose of her look, undisposed to lavishness, which never wavers.
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