Oïdas came. He came very often, hardly noticed by Inarime, beyond the fact that his coming provided her with flowers, and that he frequently conducted her to the theatre where she heard the surfeiting honey strains of Bellini and Verdi, and to the Saturday concerts at the Parnassus Club of which he was president, where Bellini and Verdi were also in the ascendant.
“Have you any feeling towards Kyrios Oïdas?” her father once ventured to ask.
“Feeling! I have not remarked him specially. He is polite, but I should imagine not interesting,” Inarime replied.
“Ah!” interjected Selaka, with an air of partial self-commiseration. Having made up his mind after prolonged doubting upon so minor a point, to accept Oïdas for a son-in-law, it was disconcerting to learn that the chosen one had made none but a very dubious impression upon the principal personage of the duet.
He lightly dismissed the fact as another proof of the singular and incorrigible perversity of woman, not even to be counteracted by such anomalous training and education as he had given this particular one.
Not to be out of the fashion, the Baroness von Hohenfels had rapturously taken up the new beauty. Inarime was frequently invited to the Austrian Embassy, and her acquaintance with Mademoiselle Veritassi and her band progressed to intimacy. The delight of joyous youth that lives unthinkingly upon the beating of its own pulses struck dormant rays from her closed nature. She shook off the shadow of her own calm past and emerged from gloom, a radiant being, now and then weighted with her recent heavy bereavement, only to rebound again into realms of intoxicating instability. The friction of her natural forces with these laughing creatures urged her upward, and a return to the desolate solitude of a world unblessed by the presence of her lover, left her amazed, incredulous and giddy.
The trashy music she had heard struck her as enchantment, until Mademoiselle Veritassi chilled her enthusiasm.
“Do you sometimes go to the theatre?” she queried.
“Here?”
“Yes.”