"My dear lord," she says seriously, "I think in your enthusiasm you forget one thing, that there is ground on which good seed falls and brings forth flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which the same seed, be it strewn every so thickly, lies always barren. Without underrating the influences of your tutor, I must believe that had you been educated at an English public school, or even in a French Lycée, you would still have become a scholar, still have loved your books."
"Alas, madame," says Brandolin, with a little sigh, "perhaps I have only been what Matthew Arnold calls a 'foiled circuitous wanderer' in the orbit of life!"
"I imagine that you have not very often been foiled," replies the lady, with a smile, "and wandering has a great deal to be said in its favor, especially for a man. Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor."
"Women used to be: not our women. Nous avons changé tout cela. I have bored you too much with myself and my opinions."
"No, you interest me," says his companion with a serious serenity which deprives the words of all sound of flattery or encouragement. "I have long admired your writings," she adds, and Brandolin colors a little with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said to him on an average five hundred times a year, and his usual emotion is either ennui or irritation. The admiration of fools is folly, and humiliates him. But the admiration of so lovely a woman as Xenia Sabaroff would lay a flattering unction to the soul of any man, even if she were absolutely mindless; and she gives him the impression that she has a good deal of mind, and one out of the common order.
"My writings have no other merit," he says, after the expression of his sense of the honor she does him, "than being absolutely the chronicle of what I have seen and what I have thought; and I think they are expressed in tolerably pure English, though that is claiming a great deal in these times; for since John Newman laid down the pen there is scarcely a living Briton who can write his own tongue with eloquence and purity."
"I think it must be very nice to leave off wandering if one has a home," replies Madame Sabaroff, with a slight sigh, which gave him the impression that, though no doubt she had many houses, she had no home. "Where is your place that you spoke of just now?—the place where you learned to love Horace?"
Brandolin is always pleased to speak of St. Hubert's Lea. He has a great love for it and for the traditions of his race, which makes many people accuse him of great family pride, though, as has been well said á propos of a greater man than Brandolin, it is rather that sentiment which the Romans defined as piety. When he talks of his old home he grows eloquent, unreserved, cordial; and he describes with an artist's touch its antiquities, its landscapes, and its old-world and sylvan charms.
"It must be charming to care for any place so much as that," says his companion, after hearing him with interest.
"I think one cares more for places than for people," he replies.