" Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from
the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with
ditches,--in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent,
aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall?
Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste
who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two
hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress on the
boards. She fell into a state of numb depression that was pitiful to
see. The sun was darkened, nature veiled itself, even the flowers no
longer spoke to her. Like all young girls with a tendency to extremes,
she drank too deeply of the cup of disillusion. She fought against
reality, and would not bend her neck to the yoke of family and
conventions; it was, she felt, too heavy, too hard, too crushing. She
would not listen to the consolations of her father and mother, and
tasted a sort of savage pleasure in letting her soul suffer to the
utmost.
"Poor Butscha was right," she said one evening.
The words indicate the distance she travelled in a short space of time
and in gloomy sadness across the barren plain of reality.
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