Blanchette had known very little emotion in her twenty years of existence, hardly any pain except that of some ruffled egotism or some denied caprice. She had been a woman of the world to her finger tips, from the time of her infancy, when she had been curled and frizzed and dressed in the latest mode to show her small person in the children's balls at Deauville or at Aix; but when she had heard of the death of her cousin, and realised that she would never hear the voice of Yseulte again on earth, she had known a grief more violent, a regret more sudden and sincere, than her vain and self-absorbed little life could have been supposed capable of in its inflated frivolity and egotism. With her intuitive knowledge of human nature, she had divined the true cause of that death, and into her small cold soul there had entered two sentiments which were not of self: the one an imperishable regret for her cousin, the other an imperishable hatred of Nadine Napraxine.
Others forgot: she did not.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Amyôt was to the great world of the hour what Compiègne used to be to it in the finest days of the Second Empire. More indeed, for whilst nearly all patrician France would never pass an imperial threshold, there was no one of such eminence in all the nobilities of Europe that he or she did not covet, and feel flattered to obtain, their invitation to those summer and autumnal festivities of the Château Othmar. But enraptured as her guests all were, the châtelaine of Amyôt remained moderately pleased by what pleased her guests so excessively, and less and less pleased with every year.
'After all, there is nothing really new in anything we do here,' she said slightingly to Loris Loswa, who occupied there a half-privileged and half-subordinate position as chief director of the various entertainments; it was he who brought the greatest actors on the stage, who initiated the greatest singers to direct the concerts, who invented new figures for the cotillions, and who organised the moonlight fêtes in the gardens with the docility of a courtier and the ready imagination of a clever artist steeped to his fingers' ends in the traditions of the eighteenth century.
'Vereschaguin would certainly not be one half so useful in the summer in a French château,' said Nadine, with her contemptuous appreciation of his merits and accomplishments.
'Take care that your poodle does not bite one day,' Othmar answered. 'You hurt his vanity very often.'
'He may bite me for aught I know,' she replied. 'But be very sure he will never quarrel with Amyôt. He is very prudent in his own self-interest.'