V
She had made the acquaintance of Count Maidanoff in Trouville. She had been presented to him on the promenade, and a far-flung circle of fashionables had looked on. Careful murmurs had blended with the thunder of the sea.
She came home and grasped Susan by the shoulders. “Don’t let me go out again,” she said, pale and breathing heavily. “I don’t want to look into those eyes again. I must not meet that man any more.”
Susan exhausted herself promising this. She did not know who had awakened such horror in her mistress. “Elle est un peu folle,” she said to M. Labourdemont, the secretary, “mais ce grain de folie est le meilleur de l’art.”
The next day Count Maidanoff announced his formal call, and had to be received.
The conventional act of homage, to which he was entitled by his birth, he repaid with a personal and sincere one.
His speech was heavy and slow. He seemed to despise the words, the use of which caused him such exertion. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of a sentence and frowned in annoyance. Between his eyebrows there were two straight, deep lines that made his face permanently sombre. His smile began with an upward curl of the lips, and quivered down into his thin, colourless beard, like the effect of a muscular paralysis.
He went straight and without circumlocution toward his purpose. It was commonly the office of his creatures to clear the road toward his amatory adventures. By doing the wooing himself in this instance he desired to single out its object by an act of especial graciousness.
The cool timidity of the dancer had pleased him at first. Fear was to him the most appealing quality in men. But Eva’s repressed chill in the face of his courteous proposals confused him. His eyes became empty, he looked bored, and asked for permission to light a cigarette.
He talked of Paris, of a singer at the Grand Opera there. Then he became silent, and sat there like some one who has all eternity ahead of him. When he arose and took his leave, he looked as though he were really asleep.