Poor brave goaded soul! She had a vague idea of 'bearing testimony' as her father would have borne it in like circumstances. But she turned very pale. Even to her the word 'Christian' sounded like a bombshell in that room. The great traveller looked up astounded. He saw a tall woman in white with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something indescribably noble and unusual in her whole look and attitude. She looked like a Quaker prophetess—like Dinah Morris in society—like—but his comparisons failed him. How did such a being come there? He was amazed; but he was a man of taste, and Madame de Netteville caught a certain æsthetic approbation in his look.
She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual.
'May one Christian pronounce for all?' she said with a scornful affectation of meekness. 'Mrs. Elsmere, please find some chair more comfortable than that ottoman; and Mr. Ansdale, will you come and be introduced to Lady Aubrey?'
After her guests had gone Madame de Netteville came back to the fire flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that strange little encounter she had suffered, and she never forgot or forgave the smallest social discomfiture.
'Can I put up with that again?' she asked herself with a contemptuous hardening of the lip. 'I suppose I must if he cannot be got without her. But I have an instinct that it is over—that she will not appear here again. Daudet might make use of her. I can't. What a specimen! A boy and girl match, I suppose. What else could have induced that poor wretch to cut his throat in such fashion? He, of all men!'
And Eugénie de Netteville stood thinking—not, apparently, of the puritanical wife; the dangerous softness which overspread the face could have had no connection with Catherine.
Madame de Netteville's instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere never appeared again in her drawing-room.
But, with a little sad confession of her own invincible distaste, the wife pressed the husband to go without her. She urged it at a bitter moment, when it was clear to her that their lives must of necessity, even in outward matters, be more separate than before. Elsmere resisted for a time; then, lured one evening towards the end of February by the prospect conveyed in a note from Madame de Netteville, wherein Catherine was mentioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, of meeting one of the most eminent of French critics, he went, and thenceforward went often. He had, so far, no particular liking for the hostess; he hated some of her habitués; but there was no doubt that in some ways she made an admirable holder of a salon, and that round about her there was a subtle mixture of elements, a liberty of discussion and comment, to be found nowhere else. And how bracing and refreshing was that free play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his leader's rôle and weary of himself!
As to the woman, his social naïveté, which was extraordinary, but in a man of his type most natural, made him accept her exactly as he found her. If there were two or three people in Paris or London who knew or suspected incidents of Madame de Netteville's young married days which made her reception at some of the strictest English houses a matter of cynical amusement to them, not the remotest inkling of their knowledge was ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man who attracted scandals. Nor was it anybody's interest to spread them. Madame de Netteville's position in London society was obviously excellent. If she had peculiarities of manner and speech they were easily supposed to be French. Meanwhile she was undeniably rich and distinguished, and gifted with a most remarkable power of protecting herself and her neighbours from boredom. At the same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in her friends than in her, he could not possibly be insensible to the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room. Madame de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates as to the young reformer's social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms. But those intimates were the first to notice that as soon as he entered the room those optimisms of his were adroitly respected. She had various delicate contrivances for giving him the lead; she exercised a kind of surveillance over the topics introduced; or in conversation with him she would play that most seductive part of the cynic shamed out of cynicism by the neighbourhood of the enthusiast.