as a nun, that she shut herself up in her room for the whole day and the whole evening, and that she neither spoke nor smiled, and only answered with a nod of her head all the questions of the old madam. They maintained that she would carry away the prize at an exhibition of virtue. Jiří laughed at all these remarks, but inwardly he felt their biting irony:
“They are right,” thought he; “I am acting ridiculously. A fine ending that! After all that life has taught me, after all that I have experienced, I have sunk into this mire. And what is it that attracts me to it? Is it that ancient Romanticism which they call love? Nonsense, nonsense! These strings have broken in me long ago. It is nothing but an every-day paradox, a flower cast into the mud, which I should otherwise never have noticed in my life. . . . Let us make an end of it!”
All kinds of things occurred to him: to disappear, to travel,—but then the final
