“And who was to be my future cousin?”
“She was ugly as mortal sin: her left shoulder approached too conspicuously the ear on the same side, while the right shoulder was separated from the ear, its neighbor, by a distance too marked. I therefore refused the indorsement.”
“You were wrong,” said the countess, “above all, knowing that—” She did not finish. She had seen pass over the frank and open countenance of her cousin the expression of a bitter recollection.
“Is she happy?” he demanded.
“As much as one can be in this world. She lives very retired, since above all she expects soon to be a mother.”
“And he?”
“Entirely changed, since the marriage. He is a model of a husband. The family have received him as a returned prodigal son.”
“And Eloisita?”
“Hers is a lamentable history. She secretly espoused a French adventurer, who called himself cousin of the Prince of Rohan, coadjutor of Alexander Dumas, and sent by the Baron Taylor to purchase artistic curiosities, and who, unfortunately, is called Abelard. She saw in the name of her beloved and in her own the decree of destiny commanding their union; and in this man, at the same time literary, artistic, and of princely family, she believed she saw the ideal being who had appeared to her in her beautiful dreams of gold, and a happy future. She regarded her parents, who opposed this union, as the tyrants of a melodrama, of ideas retrograde, and filled with obscurity.”
“And of Spainishism,” added the general, ironically. “And the learned señorita, nourished by novels and poetic flowers, united herself to this grand swindler, already twice married, as we learned later. After the lapse of some months, after having dissipated the money she had given him, he abandoned her at Valence, where her unfortunate father went to seek her, and to take her back, dishonored, but neither married, nor widow, nor maid. You see, my nephew, to what leads this mad love of strangerism.”