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SACRIFICE
STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN
D. Appleton and Company New York :: 1922 :: London
SACRIFICE
PART ONE
Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their child a legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers mentioned in the obituaries.
After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by the window in a charming neglig?e, paler than a camellia, hardly turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her.
Recovering, somehow, she traveled.
On those journeys every possible hardship was neutralized by wealth. Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the Midi and the Riviera blue. In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse cries of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed. In Switzerland, as dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of resentment and perverse antipathy.
She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the splendor of the altar.
Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia." But then he usually felt the need of a physician's services also.
He was taller than his wife, a brownish, meager, handsome man with dark circles round his eyes. A doctor had once told him that some persons never had more than a limited amount of nervous energy; so he was always trying to conserve his share, as if the prolongation of his idle life were very important. Yet he was not dull. He had written several essays, on classical subjects, that were privately circulated in sumptuous bindings. He played Brahms with unusual talent. But certain colors and perfumes set his nerves on edge, while the sight of blood, if more than a drop or two, made him feel faint.
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