‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please, please do not distress yourself any more about me. Please say that you are not angry now.’
As she spoke she leaned quite close to him, letting her flowers slip down. She felt quite safe with two broad black backs and two black cockades visible on the box under a large umbrella.
‘Look,’ she went on; ‘I promise you to come once—at least once—before——’ but here she stopped in dismay. Carried away by her feelings, she was on the point of telling him that they were soon to part, and that she was going to St. Petersburg. Recovering herself in a moment, she declared emphatically that she would call unannounced some afternoon when she was not going to visit the mausoleum.
‘But you go there every afternoon,’ he said, with clenched teeth and such a queer accent of suppressed indignation that a smile played beneath the widow’s veil, and to make a diversion she put down the window. The shower was over. The brougham had turned into a poor quarter, where the street in its squalid gaiety seemed to feel that the worst of the year was past, as the sun, almost hot enough for summer, lighted up the wretched shops, the barrows at the gutter’s edge, the tawdry placards, and the rags that fluttered in the windows. The Princess looked out upon it with indifference. Such trivialities are non-existent for people accustomed to see them from the cushions of their carriage at an elevation of two feet from the road. The comfort of the springs and the protection of the glass have a peculiar influence upon the eyes, which take no interest in things below their level.
Madame de Rosen was thinking, ‘How he loves me! And how nice he is!’ The other suitor was of course more dignified, but it would have been much pleasanter with this one. Oh, dear! The happiest life is but a service incomplete, and never a perfect set!
By this time they were nearing the cemetery. On both sides of the road were stonemasons’ yards, in which the hard white of slabs, images, and crosses mingled with the gold of immortelles and the black or white beads of wreaths and memorials.
‘And what about Védrine’s statue? Which way do we decide?’ he asked abruptly, in the tone of a man who means to confine himself to business.
‘Well, really—’ she began. ‘But, oh dear, oh dear, I shall hurt your feelings again?’
‘My feelings! how so?’
The day before, they had been to make a last inspection of the knight, before he was sent to the foundry. At a previous visit the Princess had received a disagreeable impression, not so much from Védrine’s work, which she scarcely looked at, as from the strange studio with trees growing in it, with lizards and wood-lice running about the walls, and all around it roofless ruins, suggesting recollections of the incendiary mob. But from the second visit the poor little woman had come back literally ill. ‘My dear, it is the horror of horrors!’ Such was her real opinion, as given the same evening to Madame Astier. But she did not dare to say so to Paul, knowing that he was a friend of the sculptor, and also because the name of Védrine is one of the two or three which the fashionable world has chosen to honour in spite of its natural and implanted tastes, and regards with an irrational admiration by way of pretending to artistic originality. That the coarse rude figure should not be put on dear Herbert’s tomb she was determined, but she was at a loss for a presentable reason.