He looked at her with a curious wonder and admiration; he was angered, humbled, incensed, and allured, and yet he was glad; she looked so handsome thus with the curl on her quiet lips, and her spirited head fit for a bronze cast of Atalanta.
He was an old man; he could bear to pause and rightly appreciate the charm of scorn, the spur of irony, the good of hatred. He knew the full value of its sharp spears to the wonder-blooming aloe.
He left the subject for a happier moment, and, seating himself, opened his hands to warm them by the wood fire, still watching her with that smile, which for its very indulgence, its merry banter, she abhorred.
"You lost your Norse god as I prophesied?" he asked, carelessly.
He saw her whole face change as with a blow, and her body bend within itself as a young tree bends under a storm.
"He went when you gave him the gold," she said below her breath.
"Of course he went. You would have him set free," he said, with the little low laugh still in his throat. "Did I not say you must dream of nothing else if once you had him freed? You would be full of faith; and unbar your eagle's prison-house, and then, because he took wing through the open door, you wonder still. That is not very wise, Folle-Farine."
"I do not wonder," she said, with fierce effort, stifling her misery. "He had a right to do as he would: have I said any otherwise?"
"No. You are very faithful still, I see. Yet, I cannot think that you believed my prophecy, or you—a woman—had never been so strong. You think I can tell you of his fate? Nay, on my soul I know nothing. Men do not speak his name. He may be dead;—you shrink? So! can it matter so much? He is dead to you. He is a great man, but he is a fool. Half his genius would give him the fame he wants with much greater swiftness than the whole ever will. The world likes talent, which serves it. It hates genius, which rules it. Men would adore his technical treatment, his pictorial magnificence, his anatomical accuracy; but they will always be in awe of his intensity of meaning, of his marvelous fertility, of his extraordinary mingling of the chillest of idealisms and the most unsparing of sensualities,—but I talk idly. Let us talk of you; see, I chose your likeness, and he let me have it—did you dream that he would part with it so lightly?"
"Why not? He had a million things more beautiful."