'And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic, and ridicule it as vieux jeu,' said Othmar to her once.

'No doubt I do; one is not happily obliged to be consistent,' she replied. 'We are too intellectual or too indifferent nowadays to have a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or an Orloff assassinated by our bedside, but the consequence is that life is dull. It is a journey in a wagon lit, one is half asleep all the time; it has no longer the picturesque incidents of a journey on horseback across moor and mountain, with the chance of meeting Malatesta or the Balafré en route.'

'Yet men have died for you!'

'Oh, my dear! they never did it with any picturesqueness at all! What picturesqueness can there be? A man falls in a duel; he is put in a cab with a doctor! A man kills himself with a revolver; there is again a doctor, and also, probably, a policeman!'

'Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those incidents from being as genuine as they used to be.'

'I know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions are nowadays all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look at ourselves, as I have said to you before.'

'Well? What of ourselves?'

'You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we are the servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter. When we were free and had the world before us, we could think of nothing more original than to marry each other like Annette and Lubin, like John and Mary. We had no imagination. We thought we should do all sorts of fine things, but we have not done them. We have merely just dropped back into the routine of the world like all other people.'

'I do not see what else we could have done,' replied Othmar, somewhat feebly as he was aware.

'What a conventional reply!' she said impatiently. 'That is just what I am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or perhaps courage, enough to strike out any new path, though we thought we were so much above other people. Both you and I have enough of originality to be dissatisfied with the world as it is, but we have not originality enough to create another one. People who have the perception which belongs to the poetic temperament, as you and I have, without its creative power, are greatly to be pitied. Both you and I have something of poetry—something of heroism—in us, but it never comes to anything. We remain in the world, and conform to it.'