'I would lead any life you suggested—out of the world if you pleased.'
'Ah, but I do not please,' she said, with a little sigh. 'That is just the mischief. You remember when we went to your Dalmatian castle the first year; the solitude was enchanting, the loneliness of the sea and the shore was exquisite, the mountains seemed drawn behind us like a curtain, shutting out all noise and commonness and only enclosing our own dreams; but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at you, and we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One morning when there was a rough wind on the sea and the first snow on the hills, I said to you, "What if we go to Paris?" and you were relieved beyond expression, only you would not say so. Now, if we had been poets—really poets, you and I—we should never have quitted Zama for Paris. We should have let the whole world go.'
Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was conscious of a certain truth in her words.
'I am not a poet, you have often told me so,' he said with some bitterness. 'The atmosphere I was born in was too thick and yellow with gold for the Parnassian bees to fly to my cradle. The supreme privilege of the poet is an imperishable youth, and I do not think that I was ever young; they did not let me be so.'
'You were so for a little while when you first loved me,' she said with a smile; 'that is why I wonder we had not more imagination at that time. Anybody could live the life we live now. It shows what a stifling, cramping thing the world is; we who used to meditate on every possible idealic and idyllic kind of existence have found that there is nothing for us to do but to open our houses, surround ourselves with a crowd, spend quantities of money in all commonplace fashions, and be hated by envy and envied by stupidity. Do you remember our sunlit kingdom in Persia that we were to have gone to together? Well, we are as far off it as though we were not together.'
'Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you think our life together a mistake?'
'No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than most people, only we have been unable to rise above the commonplace; unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our existence looks very brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but in real truth there is a poverty of invention about it which makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.'
She laughed a little; her old laugh, which always chilled the hearts of men.
She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage of joy in that mortuary chapel of lifeless bones and motionless dust to which the lovers' path through the roses and raptures was so sure to lead. But he, man like, had been so certain that the roses would never fade, that the raptures would never diminish!
Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to fulfil her expectations, and the sense of such a fact stings the self-love of the least vain and least selfish of men. Her life possessed all that any woman could in her uttermost exactness require. All the perfect self-indulgence and continual pageantry of life which an immense fortune can command were always hers; her children by him were beautiful and of great promise, physical and mental; her world still obeyed her slightest sign, and her slightest whim was gratified; men still found the most fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society offered to her all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment, of disillusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could only be so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to realise what she had expected in him—was unhappy enough to weary her, as all others before him had done.