'That is rather prudishly and puritanically put. Why should you not say honestly that the girl is very pretty, and that you like to look at her! I assure you it will not distress me.'
'I could not hope that it would,' said Othmar rather bitterly, as Paul of Lemberg entered the room.
There were times when the serene indifference to his actions which his wife displayed found him ungrateful; times when he almost wished for the warmth of interest which the impatience of jealousy would have shown. Jealousy is an odious thing, a ridiculous, an intolerable, a foolish and fretful and fierce passion, which is as wearing to the sufferer from it as to those who create it; and yet, unless a woman be jealous of him, a man is always angrily certain that she is indifferent to him. Jealousy is a flattery and a homage to him, even whilst it is an irritation and an annoyance: it assures him that he is loved even whilst it wears and whittles his own love away. But jealousy was a thing at once foolish and fond, humiliating and humble, which was altogether impossible to the serenity and the security of the proud self-appreciation in which his wife passed her existence.
In a week's time she had forgotten that she had ever seen Damaris Bérarde; but in a year's time Othmar did not forget that he had done so.
A few days later Loris Loswa was ushered into their presence; he had the sullen perturbed expression of a child baulked in its wish, or deprived of some toy.
'Loswa looks as if he had had an adventure,' she said as he entered. 'He is one of the few people to whom these things still happen.'
'I have been both shot at and nearly drowned, Madame,' replied Loswa. 'But that would not matter much if it were not that I have had also the greatest of disappointments.'
'Disappointment and assassination together are certainly too much in the same day for one person. Tell me your story.'
'I have been to Bonaventure,' said Loswa, and paused. He looked distressed and annoyed, and had lost that airy nonchalance and that provoking air of conscious seductiveness which so greatly irritated his comrades of the ateliers who had not his success either in art or in society.
'To Bonaventure, of course,' said his hostess, as she glanced at Othmar with a smile. 'Everyone is going to Bonaventure; it will very soon see as many picnics as the Ile Ste. Marguerite.'