At first such scenes annoyed him terribly, and he tried hard to prevent them. Then--well, he got used to them, even felt flattered, touched; almost forgot whence came the money that was now so abundant with him,--believed, at all events, that others had forgotten it,--and played the lavish husband with his wife, bestowed costly gifts upon her, and was pleased with her admiration of them.
All this time he lived in a kind of whirl. He had accustomed himself to his young wife's endearments, as he had accustomed himself to travel with a train of servants, to occupy the best rooms in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to smoke the best cigars, to have enormous bills at the tailor's, to gratify all his expensive tastes, to spend time in devising costly plans for the future, and, half involuntarily, to do it all as if he no longer remembered a time when he had been obliged to consider well every outlay.
In after-years his cheeks burned when he recalled this part of his life,--but there was no denying the fact--he had for a time been ostentatiously extravagant, and with his wife's money. Poor Lato!
Two years the whirl lasted; no longer.
At first he had tried to continue in the service, but the hardships of a military life became burdensome to him as he yielded to the new sense of luxury, and Selina, for her part, had no taste for the annoyances that fell to her share in the nomadic life of a soldier's wife. He resigned. They planned to purchase an estate, but could not agree upon where to purchase; and they zigzagged about, travelling from Nice to Rome, and from Rome to Paris, everywhere courteously received and fêted.
Then came their child. Selina, of course, passed the time of her confinement in Vienna, to be under her mother's protection, and nearly paid for her child's life with her own. When she recovered, her entire nature seemed changed; she was always tired. Her charm had fled. Her nose grew sharp, there were hard lines about her mouth, her face became thin, while her figure broadened.
And her feeling for Lato underwent a fundamental alteration. Hers was one of those sensual, cold-hearted natures which, when the first tempest of passion has subsided, are incapable of any deeper sentiment, and her tenderness towards her husband decreased with astonishing celerity. Henceforth, vanity became her sole passion, and in Vienna she was best able to satisfy it. The greatest enjoyment she derived from her foreign travel and from her intercourse with distinguished people lay in being able to discourse of them to her Vienna circle. She went into the world more than ever,--the world which she had known from childhood,--and dragged Lato with her. She was never weary of displaying in financial society her new title, her distinguished husband, her eccentric Parisian toilets.
Her world sufficed her. She never dreamed of asking admission to his world. He made several melancholy attempts to introduce his wife among his relatives; they failed lamentably. No one had any particular objection to Selina. Had she been a poor girl all would have vied with one another in doing something for her "for dear Lato's sake." But to receive all that loud, vulgar, ostentatious Harfink tribe, no one could require of them, not even the spirit of the age. Why did not Lato take his wife to the country, and separate her from her family and their influence? Then after some years, perhaps---- It was such an unfortunate idea to settle in Vienna with his wife!
Yes, an unfortunate idea!
Wherever he showed himself with his wife, at the theatre, on the Prater, everywhere, his acquaintances greeted him cordially from a distance, and avoided him as if he had been stricken with a contagious disease. On the occasion of the death of one of his aunts, he received kind letters of condolence from relatives who lived in the next street!