"I never said very beautiful; I did not even say beautiful: I simply said charming," the captain shouts.
"She is pretty. There is something very attractive about her," his wife assents, "and my husband finds her especially charming because she looks like his old flame, Eugenie Meineck. For my part, this resemblance is the only thing about Stella that I do not like. I am sorry that even in her features alone she should remind one of her aunt."
"A rather indelicate allusion on your part," growls the captain, whose brown cheeks had flushed at his wife's words.
As his wife always declared, he had never got out of roundabouts, which suited him but ill, for he was an unusually tall, broad-shouldered man, with very handsome, clear-cut features, and a face tanned and worn by war, wind and weather, but recognizable as far as it could be seen as that of a southern Slav.
"Extremely indelicate," he repeats, with emphasis.
"I think it ridiculous never to outlive disappointments," says Frau von Leskjewitsch, who ever since she was a girl of eighteen had assumed the air of a matron of vast worldly experience,--"extremely ridiculous," she adds, with comic mimicry of her husband's reproachful intonation. As she spoke she slightly threw back her head crowned with luxuriant hair gathered into a simple knot behind, half closed her eyes, and stuck one thumb in the buff leather belt that confined her dark-blue linen blouse at the waist. Baron Rohritz, an experienced connoisseur of the female sex, had stuck his eye-glass in his eye, and was gazing at her without a shadow of impertinent obtrusiveness, but with very evident interest. Without being handsome, or taking the slightest pains to appear so, she nevertheless produced a most agreeable impression. According to the Baron's computation, she was about thirty-four years old, and yet her tall slender figure had all the pliancy of early youth. Her every motion was characterized by a certain energy and determination that possessed an attraction in spite of being foreign to the generally received opinion as to what constitutes feminine grace. The eyes, shadowed by long black lashes, that looked forth from her pale, oval face were full of intelligence and constantly varying expression, her features were fine but not regular, and her laugh was charming.
"Yes," she repeated, "I insist upon it, there is nothing more ridiculous than the inability to have done with one's disappointments. Good heavens! I freely confess to myself, and to the world at large, that the worthy man with whom I was wretchedly in love for four years was one of the vainest, most insignificant, most egotistical and uninteresting geese that ever lived."
"You were not in love with him," declared the captain, who did not seem to be quite free from a certain retrospective jealousy. "You were simply under the domination of an idée fixe."
"As if the passion of love were ever anything save an idée fixe of the heart!" retorted Frau von Leskjewitsch; "and an idée fixe is a disease; while it lasts it is well to be patient with it, but when it is over one ought to thank God and get rid of the traces of it as quickly as possible. That you never did, Jack: you were always like the belles of society, who cannot make up their minds to burn up their old ball-dresses and other trophies or simply to throw them away. They stuff their trunks full of such rubbish, until there is no room left for their honest every-day clothes. Throw it away, and the sooner the better!"
"What has once been dear to me is forever sacred in my eyes," said the captain, solemnly.