"Twenty-six, then. Were you ever in love?"
To the Prince's no small surprise, Natalie turns away her head at this question, and, blushing to the very roots of her hair, mutters angrily between her set teeth, "You are intolerable to-day!"
"Ah, indeed!" says Prince Zino, with a merry twinkle of his eyes. "It must be with one of the lithographic portraits hanging in the corridor in your home at Jekaterinovskoe,--Orlow, or Potemkin. By the way, 'tis a great pity you blush so seldom, Natalie: it becomes you charmingly."
At the next street-corner Stella's and Natalie's ways separate, to the great vexation of the Prince, seeing that he too must of course take his leave of the beautiful Austrian. But, if he can no longer enjoy the pleasure of talking with Stella, he resolves to please himself by still keeping her in sight. Instead of remaining with his cousin and quietly going his own way, he decides to walk along the same street with Stella, on the other side of the way.
Natalie, who understands his little manœuvre perfectly, looks after him before turning her corner, and shakes her head. "I wonder how many times he has been in love before?" she thinks. "Poor little star! she is very pretty. I trust she may be more sensible than I."
Meanwhile, Zino and Stella walk leisurely along on opposite sides of the Rue des Petits-Champs.
"How well she walks! what a fine carriage she has!" he murmurs, never losing sight of her. "Her movements have such an easy grace, and now and then a dreamy, gliding rhythm about them; 'tis music for the eyes. And then such colour,--the fair face with its black eyes and red lips, the gold of the hair setting off the exquisite glow of the complexion,--she is enchanting!"
Zino is one of those men whose sensuality is refined and idealized by the admixture of a purely artistic and æsthetic appreciation of the beautiful. The worship of the beautiful is, as he is fond of declaring, his own special, private religion; the paroxysms of enthusiasm which this worship was apt to cause in him in former years have long since grown rarer and rarer. But to-day he is distinctly conscious of the slow approach of an attack.
"Bah! it will pass away," he says to himself, "as all such attacks do; it can lead to nothing. But all the same she is bewitching!"
Thus both go their ways,--he with his eyes, quite intoxicated with beauty, riveted upon her face and figure,--she, as he is rather annoyed to perceive, so absorbed in her own thoughts as to be utterly oblivious of his vicinity. Between them, around them, swarms Parisian life, with its bustle and noise; on the pavements pass neat grisettes by twos and threes, their smooth hair uncovered, either coming from or going to breakfast, men with dirty grayish-white blouses, servant-girls in white caps, Englishwomen with long teeth, and Parisians of all kinds, recklessly pressing on towards some aim known to themselves only; in the middle of the street there is a hurly-burly of every kind of vehicle, from little hand-carts, laden with fish, flowers, oranges, or vegetables, and pushed by women with bent backs, to omnibuses as big as small houses, their tops reaching above the shop-windows, and dragged with difficulty by the strongest horses. Here and there some one is running after one or other of these conveyances, a breathless day-governess, helped up by both hands to the back platform by the conductor, or a notary with a leather wallet under his arm, who climbs to the top with the agility of a monkey.