XLVI
“I’ve received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to her the next evening as soon as he came into the room. He announced this truth with an unadorned directness as well as with a freedom of manner that showed his visit to be one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn’t it have been by your old lady?” Muniment returned. “He must have met her in Paris. It’s from Paris he writes.”
“What an incorrigible cad!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t see that—for writing to me. I’ve his letter in my pocket and I’ll show it to you if you like.”
“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched.”
“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked with one of the easy sequences of a man who sees things as they are.
The Princess considered. “Yes, I make an exception for that, because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.”
“I should think on the contrary it would gratify him by showing you in a state of weakness and dependence.”
“Not when he knows I don’t use it for myself. What exasperates him is that it’s devoted to ends which he hates almost as much as he hates me and yet which he can’t call selfish.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” said Muniment with the same pleasant reasonableness—that of a man who has mastered not two or three but all the possible aspects of a question. “His letter satisfies me of that.” The Princess stared at this and asked what he was coming to—if he were leading up to the hint that she should go back and live with her husband. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to advise it,” he replied; “when I’ve so much benefit from seeing you here on your present footing, that wouldn’t sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy you’ll go before very long.”