In an early time Othmar, absent from her, had been given to pour out his feelings in ardent expression, and even offer her those delicate flowers of sentiment which always dwell shyly hidden in every deep and affectionate temperament. But one day she had written back to him a cruel little word. She had said: 'You are Obermann and Amiel; do you really think life is either long enough or interesting enough to be worth so very much sentimental speculation?'
It was only her irresistible and incurable poco-curantism which dictated the lines, but they mortified and chilled him. He dreaded, with something that was actually apprehension, her ridicule or her irony. He knew well that to weary her was to lose her favour. From that day he had never written to her a syllable of the feelings and reflections of his inmost thoughts.
'She has never really loved me,' he had said to himself bitterly, of the woman on whom he had spent the great passion of his life.
Therefore it became easy to him to say nothing of the presence of Damaris in his house in Paris.
'I shall tell her when I meet her, and she will not even listen to it, most probably,' he said to himself. It would entirely depend upon the mood in which he might find her, whether the part which he had himself played would seem to her utterly absurd or partly worthy of sympathy.
'If only Melville were in Europe!' he thought very often. But Melville was in China, using his persuasive eloquence and Churchman's tact to obtain Celestial concessions and protection to the Jesuit missions in the Flowery Land. Melville had written to him: 'I walk amongst the ruined palaces and desolated gardens which the Allies defiled in 1860, and endeavour to believe that it is we who are the civilised and the Chinese who are the barbaric people, but I fail. Shall we ever be apostles of light whilst our coming is proclaimed with musketry, and our path strewn before us with charred ruins? It was a strange way of teaching enlightenment to destroy in a day treasures of beauty and of art which all the world together could not reproduce again.'
Melville was taking his scholarly thought and his courtly smile through the flowering ways and over the marble bridges of the Summer Palace, believing, if he thought of her at all, that the child he had baptized and taught was safe in her island home amongst the flowering orange-trees, steering through the blue water at her will, and going in peace and quietude to the churches on the shore.