I felt the anger burning in my eyes. “Yours, his! She is no man's property. She is herself,” I cried.
The wrinkles round his nose and mouth smoothed themselves out. “You need not be afraid,” he sneered. “As you say, she is the Countess Huescar. Can you imagine her as Mrs. Doctor Washburn? I can't.” He took her photograph in his hand again. “The lower part of the face is the true index to the character. It shows the animal, and it is the animal that rules. The soul, the intellect, it comes and goes; the animal remains always. Sensuousness, love of luxury, vanity, those are the strings to which she dances. To be a Countess is of more importance to her than to be a woman. She is his, not mine. Let him keep her.”
“You do not know her,” I answered; “you never have. You listen to what she says. She does not know herself.”
He looked at me queerly. “What do you think her to be?” he asked me. “A true woman, not the shallow thing she seems?”
“A true woman,” I persisted stoutly, “that you have not eyes enough to see.”
“You little fool!” he muttered, with the same queer look—“you little fool. But let us hope you are wrong, Paul. Let us hope, for her sake, you are wrong.”
It was at one of Deleglise's Sunday suppers that I first met Urban Vane. The position, nor even the character, I fear it must be confessed, of his guests was never enquired into by old Deleglise. A simple-minded, kindly old fellow himself, it was his fate to be occasionally surprised and grieved at the discovery that even the most entertaining of supper companions could fall short of the highest standard of conventional morality.
“Dear, dear me!” he would complain, pacing up and down his studio with puzzled visage. “The last man in the world of whom I should have expected to hear it. So original in all his ideas. Are you quite sure?”
“I am afraid there can be no doubt about it.”
“I can't believe it! I really can't believe it! One of the most amusing men I ever met!”