“You are, Madame”—said El-Râmi, smiling pensively and fixing his dark eyes upon her with a kind expression,—“And your native good sense and wit will prevent you, I hope, from marring the good which the gods have provided for you. Do not marry yet,—it would be too great a disillusion for you. The smallest touch of prose is sufficient to destroy the delicacy of love’s finer sentiments; and marriage, as the married will tell you, is all prose,—very prosy prose too. Avoid it!—prosy prose is tiresome reading.”
She laughed, and rose to take her leave.
“I saw your brother with Mr. Ainsworth yesterday,” she observed—“And I could not understand how two such opposite natures could possibly agree.”
“Oh, we did not agree,—we have not agreed,” said Féraz hastily, speaking for himself—“It is not likely we shall see much of each other.”
“I am glad to hear it”—and she extended her hand to him, “You are very young, and Roy Ainsworth is very old, not in years, but in heart. It would be a pity for you to catch the contagion of our modern pessimism.”
“But——” Féraz hesitated and stammered, “it was you, was it not, Madame, who suggested to Mr. Ainsworth that he should take me as the model for one of the figures in his picture?”
“Yes, it was I,” replied Irene with a slight smile—“But I never thought you would consent,—and I felt sure that, even if you did, he would never succeed in rendering your expression, for he is a mere surface-painter of flesh, not soul—still, all the same, it amused me to make the suggestion.”
“Yes,—woman-like,” said El-Râmi—“You took pleasure in offering him a task he could not fulfil. There you have another reason why intellectual women are frequently detested—they ask so much and give so little.”
“You wrong us,” answered Irene swiftly. “When we love, we give all!”
“And so you give too much!” said El-Râmi gravely—“It is the common fault of women. You should never give ‘all’—you should always hold back something. To be fascinating, you should be enigmatical. When once man is allowed to understand your riddle thoroughly, the spell is broken. The placid, changeless, monotonously amiable woman has no power whatever over the masculine temperament. It is Cleopatra that makes a slave of Antony, not blameless and simple Octavia.”