The bowed head and shoulders jerked backwards, as though to avoid a blow; ... the eyes stared fixedly at me with an expression of horror such as I had never before encountered in my whole life. The next moment a shudder passed through the whole convulsed body.... And suddenly there burst forth a storm of sobbing.... The weeping went on, grew, if anything, more vehement, breaking forth again and again, like a gush of blood, like a hot agony of vomiting, in spasm after spasm.

Hofmiller retreats to the salon, where Ilona intercepts him. Are you mad? she says. Didnt you see her crippled legs? No, he didnt; she was sitting at a table. He bolts from the house, his heart hot with shame.

Edith has thus made her first strike, spontaneously. (As we discover, she often has such fits when something displeases her.) But for the folie deux that is the novels subject to take root, Hofmiller must make a complementary response. Already that night, he is appalled at having given such pain: I felt as though I had struck an innocent child with a whip. At the same time, another thought one that will become important as the story continues begins working on his mind: his prestige as an officer. He has committed a gaffe, a social error, and has thereby dishonored both his regiment and himself within the regiment: At our mess table every piece of idiocy on the part of any one of us was chewed over for the next ten or twenty years. The following morning, spending all he has left of his months pay, he sends Edith a great bouquet of roses. In return, he receives a note from her, inviting him to tea. He neednt say what day hes coming, she adds: I am alas! always at home. Already she is appealing to his compassion, and when, the next afternoon, he pays his call, she does so again, telling him how, before the illness that paralyzed her legs five years earlier, she loved to dance, she wanted to be Pavlova. But alas!

The day after this visit, the innocent Hofmiller is riding out to the morning parade, his men behind him. He loves riding, and he spurs his horse to a gallop: On, on, on, gallop, gallop, gallop! Ah, to ride thus, to ride thus to the ends of the earth! But suddenly, in the midst of this ecstasy, he remembers Edith, and is ashamed of his physical strength, physical enjoyment. He orders his men to slow to a trot. Disappointed, they obey. That, Hofmiller says, was the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity.

Interestingly, anti-sentimentally, the object of his pity is not endearing. Edith is narcissistic and imperious a diva of pain. At tea the day before, she had been forced to leave early (the masseur had arrived), and, though accustomed to using a wheelchair, this time she insisted on walking: