He raised to his lips the pointed fingers negligently extended, and murmured something to which Lady Victoria replied in French as pure and fluent as his own; and in a low rich voice, with not an echo in it of her habitual abruptness or haughty languor.
The Frenchman accepted a cigarette and a low chair opposite the divan, whose golden cushions seemed subtly to embrace the yielding flexible figure against them. Neither took the slightest notice of the third person beyond a muttered introduction and acknowledgment, and as the man embarked on a soft torrent of speech, bearing the burden of his beatitude in at last meeting the only Englishwoman whose fame in Paris was as great as among her native fogs, Isabel rose and retreated with what dignity she could summon. Then Lady Victoria, seeing that she was rid of her, and courteous under all her idiosyncrasies, rose with a long motion of repressed energy and accompanied her to the door, her hand resting lightly against the crisp organdie belt.
"Will you pour out the tea for me?" she asked, sweetly. "I doubt if I go down."
No small part of her dangerous fascination lay in her sincerity. She really liked Isabel, although it was characteristic of her that she did not in the least care at what conclusions that puzzled young woman might arrive in a more solitary meditation.
When Isabel found herself in the long cool corridor, set thick with gentle landscapes, and hunting squires, and dames haughty and humble, she drew a long breath of relief, as if she had escaped from a jungle. But she felt oddly wounded in her self-love, young and silly. She had thought herself old in the last three years, tremendously modern. What did she know? The easy morals of students in France and Germany had repelled her at first, but she had ended by accepting them as a matter of course, and had rather plumed herself upon her accumulating grains and blends of human nature. She felt a rush of contempt for their crudity. What children they were with their simple unmorality of artists, as ignorant of the real world as babes in a wood!
When she reached her own room she astonished herself by bursting into a passion of tears. It was some time before she understood what had induced it. It was not that the illusions of youth had received a hard blow, for many of them had disappeared long since in Paris, when she had supported an American girl of decent family but too much liberty through the most desperate experience that a young woman, alone and friendless in a foreign city, well could have. The girl had died cursing all men and the folly of women, and after Isabel had buried her and the leading cause of her repentance, she returned to her lonely flat in a state of disillusion and disgust which seemed to encase her by no means susceptible heart in a triple panoply. This state of mind had lasted for at least three months. And there was little of which she had not abstract knowledge, nor had she lived a quarter of a century to learn for the first time of the license which the world permits to women so highly placed that they have come to believe themselves above all laws.
But all her experience and abstract knowledge counted for nothing, and she had for the first time a sudden and complete appreciation of the evil of the world and of its odd association with even the higher virtues; of the fact that in the upper walks of life the balance was more nearly even than on planes where there existed scantier opportunities for development. There was no question that Victoria Gwynne was made on a magnificent plan, as capable of heroism, no doubt, as any of the salient women of history. She was an ornament in her world, useful, sympathetic, the author of much good, a devoted and inspiring mother. And yet there was no more question that this Frenchman was the last of a long line of favored adorers than that Victoria, for all her individualities, was but a type of her kind: a kind that was sufficiently distinct from the hundreds of wholly estimable women that were proud to know her, or accepted her as a matter of course.
And even these good women? Had they not the same passions, the same inclinations in the secrecies of their souls? What was the determining cause of their indisputable virtue? A happy marriage? Too many children? Timidity? Absence of temptation? Or were they merely orthodox through a more uneven balancing of their qualities, the animal in abeyance? For this very reason were they not frequently narrow, unsympathetic, unuseful—unless, indeed, they were of the few who, with the mighty temptations of the Victoria Gwynnes, were mightier still in their fidelity to some inner and cherished ideal. This lofty ideal of womanhood Isabel had unconsciously set up in her soul, and the sudden conviction of its imperfection was, after all, the reason of her sudden despair. For the soul with its immemorial and often incommunicable knowledge may have its moments of terror while the mind wonders.
And she was disheartened at the sense of insignificance and mortification inspired by this contact with a side of life, as real and consequent as motherhood or government, instead of feeling merely repelled, infinitely superior in her unstained maidenhood. She had no wish to emulate, but neither did she relish feeling provincial, a chit, an outsider. Her youthful vanity had its way in a mind too speculative, intelligent, observant, merely to be shocked. Her memory reverted to experiences that had made her feel as much older than the ordinary girl as she now felt at sea. What was she, Isabel Otis, after all? She felt a mere assortment of fluids, which might or might not crystallize into some such being as she had dimly apprehended, or into something quite commonplace; realized with a shock that her own deep personal experience had left her less definitely moulded than she had imagined.
She rose impatiently and bathed her eyes before ringing for the maid to lace her for dinner—it was long past tea-time. "Perhaps I had better marry Lord Hexam and have ten children," she thought. "That sort of existence has kept more women up to the correct standard than anything else except poverty."