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 believe that the touch of her hand must surpass everything conceivable.
Whole generations of breeding inhere in her disciplined blood. It is touching, her resigned subjection under the dictates of tact, bearing witness to contrariness defeated, to rebellions suppressed, to her silent sobbing in the night, and the outrages inflicted on her pride. With her every movement she commits herself, all goodwill and sad grace, to the prescribed forms. She does nothing beyond the necessary. Her every gesture is sparingly measured out, a pose just barely struck, entered into without enthusiasm as if merely out of a passive sense of obligation. From the depths of those triumphs, Bianka draws her premature experience, her knowledge of all things. Bianka knows everything, but she derives no joy from that knowledge. Her knowledge is serious and sad. Her mouth is closed over it in a line of absolute beauty; her eyebrows are drawn with severe accuracy. No, she derives no sanction for lenient privilege, softness or profligacy from her knowledge. Quite the reverse. It is as if that truth into which her sad eyes are gazing may be borne only by intense attention, by the most precise compliance with form. And in that unerring tact, that loyalty to form, there is a whole ocean of sadness, and arduously surmounted suffering.
And yet, however broken by form, she has emerged victorious from under it. But with what sacrifice has that triumph been achieved!
When she walks, slender and straight, who can say what sort of pride it is that she bears so simply in the forthright rhythm of her gait. Is it is her own, conquered pride, or the triumph of the principles that she has succumbed to?
But for all that, when she casts a look, a direct, sad raising of her eyes — suddenly, she knows everything. Her youth has not protected her from that insight into the most mysterious things. Her quiet temperament is her consolation for long days of sobbing. That is why her eyes are so sunken, why they have a moist, fervid glow in them, and that purpose of her look, undisposed to lavishness, which never wavers.
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