"Indeed?" I said.
"Yes indeed, an extraordinary interest," the prince repeated. "I have retained you in my memory from the time of our first meeting, which, to tell you the truth, is but rarely the case with me. But you seemed to me, and still seem, to be an original, and I take a peculiar interest in originals."
I bowed slightly, and took advantage of the pause to remark, "If it is agreeable to you to hear from me what I think, from careful examination of the chalk-quarry----"
"You see, originals are very scarce," went on the young prince, as if I had not spoken,--"incredibly scarce. No one knows that better than one of our class, who are chased up and down through the world from our youth up. Everlasting sameness: the same stereotyped faces, the same stereotyped manners, the same stereotyped phrases. I could scarcely name more than two or three persons who have produced upon me the impression that I was talking with real human beings and not with puppets. One of these is, as I said, yourself; another is an old decrepit dervish whom I lighted on, if my memory serves me, in Jerusalem, and who told me that after a search of a hundred and four years he had found the philosopher's stone, and that the thing was not worth finding; and the other was perhaps poor Constance von Zehren."
I moved uneasily in my chair, and began again--"The chalk-quarry, about which your Highness----"
"She it was that brought about our acquaintance," went on the prince, who again could not have heard me; "so it is but natural that my memory reverts to her at this moment when I have the pleasure of conversing with you so agreeably. She was a peculiar, a strangely organized being, whose nature has been to me, up to this moment, a perfect riddle, and probably will ever remain so. A mixture of apparently absolute contradictions: proud, without self-respect; bold, even foolhardy, and yet, if I may so express myself, of a catlike timidity; romantic, yet calculating--in a word, I have never been able to comprehend how such characteristics could exist together in one and the same soul. You, as you have yourself known her, will admit the correctness of my judgment; and perhaps will also agree with me in the opinion that one should reflect long before one holds a man who has had the fortune--or misfortune--to be drawn into too close an intimacy with a person of so strange a nature--an intimacy which I may well call perilous--one should reflect long, I say, before holding that man responsible for all the consequences which this perilous intimacy may entail."
The young man was still leaning back in the sofa-corner, playing with his ring, a picture of ennui and indifference. I was in the most painful position imaginable, and inly cursed the chance which had brought the indolent man to speak upon this theme of all others. Or was it then a chance? I fancied that I perceived in the tone with which he spoke the last words, some signs of internal emotion; but I could not be sure of it, and I was about to make a third and decisive attempt to bring the conversation to business matters, when the prince began again in a more animated tone:
"It is not my fault that all happened as it did. I have, it may be, one or two things upon my conscience which I had rather not have there when I sit here all alone, and for very weariness cannot even sleep; but in that affair I am really not the most culpable party. I was very young when I first saw her; she was far the older of the two, if not in years, at least in experience and worldly prudence. How she came by it I know not--with women anyhow we rarely know how they come by it--and she had it all, as I said, in a high degree. It was no slight achievement to blind me to the ruin which lay plainly enough before my eyes; the anger of the prince, my father, upon whom I am altogether dependent, the certainty that I was throwing away the hand of a noble and amiable lady who had been chosen for me: it was no trifling achievement, I say, and yet she succeeded in bringing me to it. And yet, upon my word as a nobleman, I would never have abandoned her, if I had not heard a circumstance connected with Fräulein von Zehren--or at least having reference to her--something of which she was altogether innocent--absolutely and entirely innocent--which I cannot further explain because it is not my secret, but which was of such a nature that from the moment I learned it all thoughts, whether of a lawful or illicit connection between us, became for me at once and forever impossible. Strange things come to pass in life: things which at first appall us like hideous spectres, but which one gradually becomes accustomed to and learns to endure. Do you not think so?"
The prince seemed to be half in slumber again as he put this question; but somehow I could not entirely believe in this half-sleep; on the contrary the impression grew stronger upon my mind that my distinguished host was playing with very laudable skill, a well concerted part. So his confidential communications only made me distrustful, and with a reserve that was otherwise foreign to my nature, I determined to wait and see whither this singular discourse was really tending. The prince probably expected to produce a different effect upon me, for he presently added, with eyelids half closed.
"You once felt an interest in the lady of whom we are speaking, did you not?"