"A monologist! a monologist!" replies Mr. Wootton, with a deprecatory accent.
Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not the slightest idea what a monologist is. She fancies it means some kind of a sect like the Mormons, and Brandolin is so odd that he may possibly belong to a sect, or may have founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers the black women that they talked of, and does not like to ask, being a sensitive person, very delicate-minded, and perfectly proper, except her one little affair with Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable to her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that he is.
Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a low chair behind the bigger chair on which Madame Sabaroff is reclining; other men devoted to other women look longingly at her, some approach; Brandolin comprehends why she is not beloved in her generation by her own sex.
After a time she is induced to sing; she has a very sweet voice, of great power, with much pathos in it; she sings volkslieder of her own country, strange yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases abruptly, and walks back to her seat; her diamonds gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire. Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his existence.
Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the most agreeable of pastimes. He has always wondered why anybody allowed it to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of blank verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in Paphian marble which had been dug up in a vineyard at Luna, and a work of great beauty of the second period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal a philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this statue, and whenever he felt that any living woman was getting more power over him than he liked, he compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and found that the human creature's defects outbalanced her charms, and thus reduced the potency of the latter to more reasonable dimensions.
Instead of his uncle's Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps in some remote and sealed-up nook of his mind a certain ideal; now and then he remembers it, takes it out and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at such moments the purpose which the Luna marble served with his uncle.
As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his hands in the pockets of a loose velvet jacket, he summons this useful resident of his brain, intending to banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, they seem very like one another, and their features blend confusedly into one.
"And I know nothing at all about this lady, except that she has a voice like Albani's, big jewels, and a Russian name!" he thinks, with some derision of himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, while his companions seem to him insufferably tiresome. He hears the echo of Madame Sabaroff's grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for the somewhat scabreux jests of the smoking-room. He thinks that it is all very well for boys to like that sort of salacious talk, but it seems to him intolerably absurd that men of his own age, and older, should find any kind of savor in it.
They tease him about the black women, moreover, and for once he is not easy enough to be good-tempered and indifferent. He answers contemptuously and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose, which they had not supposed before, that there is, after all, some truth in Mrs. Curzon's anecdote.
"What stupid stories that old blagueur Wootton has told in the smoking-room, and what beastly ones Fred Ormond has related! and all as if they were something new, too! as if the one weren't taken out of the manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out of last week's 'Figaro'! If men won't be original, or can't be, why don't they hold their tongues?"