"Of course," says Rohritz: "the picture was taken twelve years ago. Edgar had it taken for our mother, just before he went to Mexico. When he returned to Europe, three years later, our mother was dead, and he was gray,--gray at twenty-seven! As he was always our mother's favourite, I have hung his picture below hers."
"I maintain that photograph to be the handsomest head of a man which I know," Thérèse interrupts her conversation with the Baroness to declare. "We often dispute about it with my brother Zino, who always cites the Apollo Belvedere as the highest type of manly beauty----"
"Because he himself resembles that arrogant fellow in the Vatican," her husband interposes, dryly.
It is strange how constantly the elder brother recalls Baron Edgar, although considerably older, and by no means so distinguished in looks.
Meanwhile, Thérèse runs on with her usual fluency:
"It is an immense pity that my brother-in-law cannot make up his mind to marry. You really cannot imagine, ladies, the pains I have taken to throw the lasso over his head. Quite in vain! And such superb matches as I have made for him,--Marguerite de Lusignan, who has just married the Duke Cesarini, and the charming Marie de Gallière,--in short, the loveliest, wealthiest girls,--tout ce qu'il y a de mieux. Oddly enough, the mothers liked him as well as the daughters. In vain! I never have seen a man with so decided a distaste for matrimony as Edgar's. Did you chance to hear of the scheme by which he contrived in Grätz to rid himself of manœuvring mammas?"
"Yes," says Stella, very coldly: "he spread abroad a report that he had suddenly lost his property."
"A delicious idea," Thérèse laughs. "Do you not think so?"
Stella is silent.
"It never occurred to him to originate the report," Edmund interposes now, rather irritably; "he was merely too lazy to contradict it. To hear you talk, Thérèse, one would suppose Edgar to be the most self-conceited coxcomb under the sun,--a man who spent his life in defending himself from the attacks of matrimonially-inclined ladies. But I assure you, Baroness Stella, that Edgar has not a trace of such nonsensical coxcombry. Perhaps you know him well enough to make your own estimate of his character."