"We were in Hamburg at the Zoölogical Garden; I always go to see animals," declaimed the princess, in the midst of a thick silence. "For you know, my friends, one studies humanity there in the raw. Well, I dragged our party to the large monkey cage, and we enjoyed ourselves—immensely! And what do you think we saw! A genuine novelty. Some mischievous sailor had given an overgrown ape a mirror, and the poor wretch spent its time staring at its image, neglecting its food and snarling at its companions. The beast would catch the reflection of another ape in the glass and quickly bound to a more remote perch. The keeper told me that for a week his charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"—here she became very vivacious—"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manœuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, so egotistical, so superior, that it refused food and wasted away in a corner, gazing at itself, a hairy Narcissus, or rather the perfect type of your modern Superman, who contemplates his ego until his brain sickens and he dies quite mad."
Every one laughed. Mrs. Sheldam wondered what a Superman was, and Ermentrude felt annoyed. Zarathustra was another of her gods, and this brusquely related anecdote did not seem to her very spirituelle. But she had not formulated an answer when she heard a name announced, a name that set her heart beating. At last! The poet had kept his word. She was to meet in the flesh the man whose too few books were her bibles of art, of philosophy, of all that stood for aspiration toward a lovely ideal in a dull, matter-of-fact world.
"Now," said the princess, as if smiling at some hidden joke, "now you will meet my Superman." And she led the young American girl to Octave Kéroulan and his wife, and, after greeting them in her masculine manner, she burst forth:—
"Dear poet! here is one of your adorers from overseas. Guard your husband well, Madame Lys."
So he was married. Well, that was not such a shocking fact. Nor was Madame Kéroulan either—a very tall, slim, English-looking blonde, who dressed modishly and evidently knew that she was the wife of a famous man. Ermentrude found her insipid; she had studied her face first before comparing the mental photograph of the poet with the original. Nor did she feel, with unconscious sex rivalry, any sense of inferiority to the wife of her admired one. He was nearly forty, but he looked older; gray hairs tinged his finely modelled head. His face was shaven, and with the bulging brow and full jaw he was more of the German or Belgian than French. Black hair thrown off his broad forehead accented this resemblance; a composer rather than a prose-poet and dramatist, was the rapid verdict of Ermentrude. She was not disappointed, though she had expected a more fragile type. The weaver of moonshine, of mystic phrases, of sweet gestures and veiled sonorities should not have worn the guise of one who ate three meals a day and slept soundly after his mellow incantations. Yet she was not—inheriting, as she did, a modicum of sense from her father—disappointed.
The conversation did not move more briskly with the entrance of the Kéroulans. The marquis sullenly gossiped with Mr. Sheldam; the princess withdrew herself to the far end of the room with her two painters. Rajewski was going to a soirée, he informed them, where he would play before a new picture by Carrière, as it was slowly undraped; no one less in rank than a duchess would be present! A little stiffly, Ermentrude Adams assured the Kéroulans of her pleasure in meeting them. The poet took it as a matter of course, simply, without a suspicion of posed grandeur. Ermentrude saw this with satisfaction. If he had clay feet,—and he must have them; all men do,—at least he wore his genius with a sense of its responsibility. She held tightly her hands and leaned back, awaiting the precious moment when the oracle would speak, when this modern magician of art would display his cunning. But he was fatuously commonplace in his remarks.
"I have often told Madame Kéroulan that my successes in Europe do not appeal to me as those in far-away America. Dear America—how it must enjoy a breath of real literature!"
Mrs. Sheldam sat up primly, and Ermentrude was vastly amused. With a flash of fun she replied:—
"Yes, America does, Monsieur Kéroulan. We have so many Europeans over there now that our standard has fallen off from the days of Emerson and Whitman. And didn't America give Europe Poe?" She knew that this boast had the ring of the amateur, but it pleased her to see how it startled him.
"America is the Great Bribe," he pursued. "You have no artists in New York."