“My poor Florian! now but let us be perfectly friendly about this. I am disposed to bear no malice, because, as I so often think, what is the odds? In the long run, I mean—”
“Madame, it is my misfortune never quite to know what you mean.”
“Why, I mean that we all make mistakes, and that it is to be expected, and the least said about it, the soonest mended. Besides, as I was telling you, I do not know of course who it was that first set women upon a pedestal, and even if I did, I would be willing to overlook his mistakes too—”
“But you have not been telling me about this over-imaginative unmarried person! You were talking about malice and vanishing—”
“—Still, I certainly would not thank him, because I have had to pay for that mistake, even more heavily than women do now. Ah, Florian, as I so often think, it is always the woman who pays! For, you conceive, in my first life, back at Brunbelois, I mean, in those perfectly awful days of chivalry, I used to be worshipped, or at least that was what it came to in practise, as a symbol of heavenly excellence—”
Florian said, with an attempt at gallantry, “I can well imagine—”
“Oh, it was without any actually personal application, you understand: it was just that all ladies were regarded in that light. It was considered that in making women Heaven had revealed the full extent of Heaven’s powers. So they made us sit upon uncomfortable thrones at their tournaments—”
“But,” Florian protested, “these honorable and extremely picturesque customs—”
“My dear, that is all very well! but they used to last for a week sometimes. And there we would have to sit, from six to seven hours a day, with canopies but no cushions, and with no toilet conveniences, and with nothing whatever to do except to watch them sticking and poking and chopping one another in order to show how they respected us,—though I could never understand just how that came in, because my back hurt me too much, apart from my other troubles—”
“But as a symbol—” This horrible woman seemed resolved to leave him no one last shred of his dream.