Too Much Happiness

again, off to amuse yourself?”
    “I am on my way back from Paris,” said Sophia. “I am going back to Stockholm. Paris was not at all amusing, it was dreary as can be.” She gave him her hands to kiss, one after the other.
    “Is your Aniuta ill, then?”
    “She is dead,
mein liebe
professor.”
    “She died in prison?”
    “No, no. That was long ago. She was not in prison that time. Her husband was. She died of pneumonia, but she had been suffering in many ways for a long time.”
    “Oh, pneumonia, I have had it too. Still, that was sad for you.”
    “My heart will never heal. But I have something good to tell you, something happy. I am to be married in the spring.”
    “Are you divorcing the geologist? I do not wonder, you should have done that long ago. Still, a divorce is always unpleasant.”
    “He is dead too. And he was a paleontologist. It is a new study, very interesting. They learn things from fossils.”
    “Yes. I remember now. I have heard of the study. He died young then. I did not wish him to stand in your way, but truly I did not wish him dead. Was he ill long?”
    “You might say that he was. You surely remember how I left him and you recommended me to Mittag-Leffler?”
    “In Stockholm. Yes? You left him. Well. It had to be done.”
    “Yes. But it is over now and I am going to marry a man of the same name but not closely related and a different sort of man entirely.”
    “A Russian, then? Does he read fossils also?”
    “Not at all. He is a professor of law. He is very energetic and very good-humored except when he is very gloomy. I will bring him to meet you and you shall see.”
    “We will be pleased to entertain him,” said Weierstrass sadly. “It will put an end to your work.”
    “Not at all, not at all. He does not wish it. But I will not teach anymore, I will be free. And I will live in a delightful climate in the south of France and I shall be healthy there all the time and do all the more work.”
    “We shall see.”
    “Mein Liebe,”
she said. “I order you, order you to be happy for me.”
    “I must seem very old,” he said. “And I have led a sedate life. I have not as many sides to my nature as you have. It was such a surprise to me that you would write novels.”
    “You did not like the idea.”
    “You are wrong. I did like your recollections. Very pleasant to read.”
    “That book is not really a novel. You would not like the one I have written now. Sometimes I don’t even like it myself. It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love. Never mind, you will not have to read it. The Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.”
    “I am not generally fond of novels.”
    “They are for women?”
    “Truly I sometimes forget that you are a woman. I think of you as-as a-”
    “As a what?”
    “As a gift to me and to me alone.”
    Sophia bent and kissed his white forehead. She held back her tears till she had said good-bye to his sisters and left the house.
    I will never see him again, she thought.
    She thought of his face as white as the fresh starched pillows that Clara must have placed behind his head just that morning. Perhaps she had already taken them away, letting him slump down into the softer shabbier ones beneath. Perhaps he had fallen asleep at once, tired out from their exchange. He would have thought that they were meeting for the last time and he would have known that the thought was in her mind as well, but he would not know-this was her shame, her secret-how lightened, how free, she felt now, in spite of her tears, freer with every step away from that house.
    Was his life, she thought, so much more satisfactory to contemplate than his sisters’?
    His name would last awhile, in textbooks. And among mathematicians. Not so long as it might have done if he had been more zealous about establishing his reputation, keeping himself to the fore in his select and striving circle. He cared more for the work than for his name, when so many of his colleagues cared equally for both.
    She should not have mentioned her writing. Frivolity to him. She had written the recollections of her life at Palibino in a glow of love for everything lost, things once despaired of as well as things once treasured. She had written it far from home when that home and her sister were gone. And
Nihilist Girl
came out of pain for her country, a burst of patriotism and perhaps a feeling