his hand, she remained quite indifferent, and even occasionally raised
her habit a little as if nobody were present.

These inbred conceptions of the surpassing importance of rank
influenced her whole life. She found it impossible to make friends
with the daughters of a major or a captain, because their fathers were
her father's social inferiors. Once a lieutenant asked her for a dance.
To punish him for his impudence, she refused to talk to him in the
intervals. But when she heard later on that her partner had been one
of the royal princes, she was inconsolable. She who knew every order
and title, and the rank of every officer, had failed to recognise a
prince! It was too terrible!

She was beautiful, but pride gave her features a certain rigidity
which scared her admirers away. The thought of marriage had never
occurred to her. The young men were not fully qualified, and those to
whose social position there was no objection, were too old. If she,
the daughter of a general, had married a captain, then a major's wife
would have taken precedence of her. Such a degradation would have
killed her. Moreover, she had no wish to be a man's chattel, or an
ornament for his drawing-room. She was accustomed to command,
accustomed to be obeyed; she could obey no man. The freedom and
independence of a man's life appealed to her; it had fostered in her a
loathing for all womanly occupations.

Her sexual instinct awoke late. As she belonged to an old family which
on her father's side, had squandered its strength in a soulless
militarism, drink and dissipation, and on her mother's had suppressed
fertility to prevent the splitting up of property, Nature seemed to
have hesitated about her sex at the eleventh hour; or perhaps had