have to be demonstrated to you . . . ten years! Would you be true to me for ten days! In ten minutes you will become gloomy, dear, and grow angry at the fact that the Princess does not want you . . . because she is a princess and you are not a prince, see? And then, try as I may to convince you, it will be in vain; no demonstration will be great enough, no humiliation sufficiently deep. He would have me run after him, offer myself to him, do more than any other girl, I don’t know what! What am I to do with you?” She came up to him and offered him her lips. “Wil you be true to me for ten years, then?”
He seized hold of her, sobbing. “There,” she whispered and stroked his hair. “So you’re pulling at the chain? And yet I should have remained just as I was. Darling, darling, I know that you will leave me.” She sank into his arms. He lifted her up and forced open her closed lips with his kisses.
She lay still with her eyes closed, hardly breathing, and Prokop, bending over her, his heart oppressed, contemplated the inscrutable serenity of her hot, strained face. She extricated herself from his embrace as if in a dream. “What have you got in all those bottles? Are they poison?” She examined his shelves and instruments. “Give me some poison or other.”
“Why?”
“In case they want to take me away from here.”
Her serious face made him anxious, but to appease her he poured a solution of chalk into a small box, but at that moment she pounced on some
