"You remember unlovely things," he said, aloud. "No, I do not know them; and I should not have supposed that you, who did, could so much have cared to know them more, or could have clung to them as the only good, as you now seem to do. You cannot love such hardships?"
"I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them."
"Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?"
"I do not know—to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and forever to see the sun."
"Not a low ideal. You must await the Peruvian Paradise. Meanwhile there is a dayspring that represents the sun not ill; we call it Wealth."
"Ah!" she could not deride this god, for she knew it was the greatest of them all; when the rod of riches had been lost, had not the Far-Striking King himself been brought low and bound down to a slave's drudgery?
The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not change from its musing study, its slow, vigilant smile; holding her under the subtle influence of his gaze, Sartorian began to speak,—speak as he could at choice, with accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery. With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he placed before her that world of which she knew no more than any one of the reeds that blew by the sands of the river.
He painted to her that life of all others which was in most vital contrast and unlikeness to her own; the life of luxury, of indolence, of carelessness, of sovereignty, of endless pleasure, and supreme delight; he painted to her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent, beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from which to choose her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, her victories, her cruelties, and her seductions. He painted the long cloudless invigorating day of such a favorite of fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its laughter rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold; the same day for the same woman, whether it were called of Rome or of Corinth, of Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or of Paris, and whether she herself were hailed hetaira or imperatrix. He drew such things as the skill of his words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled him, in language which aroused her even from the absorption of her wretchedness, and stirred her dull disordered thoughts to a movement of restless discontent, and of strange wonder—Arslàn had never spoken to her thus.
He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he asked her,—
"Such lives are; do you not envy them?"