'If he be not content, who can be?' she thought.
'It is a tie,' continued he, unconscious of her surprise, 'which binds us all together. No one is so fortunate that he may not live to want aid and pity. It is not so very many years ago, as the lives of nations count, that here in Paris a king and queen became so friendless that none dare say a kind adieu to them as they went to their deaths upon the scaffold. Compared to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are! You have youth, talents, friends, and all your future.'
'I have no friends,' said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection of all solace.
'You have one at least,' said Othmar. 'You are a little in love with sorrow, my dear; all imaginative youth is so. When we have really had its actuality with us for awhile, we get to hate it bitterly, and do all we can to forget its presence.'
She looked at him with wonder.
'Have you ever been unhappy?' she said incredulously; 'with all these beautiful places? with that beautiful lady? with all the world?'
'One is never happy for more than a day,' said Othmar with some impatience. 'One wants, one wishes, one desires, one obtains, one regrets—there is the whole gamut of all human notes. The scale no sooner ascends than it descends. There is nothing happy except youth, which does not know that it is so, and so goes through all the glories of its time ignorant, purblind, longing to cease to be youth.'
'I was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully.
'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he thought with a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal happiness, born of the waves, and the winds, and the sun, and the blossoms, and the radiant joy of mere living, had been destroyed by one breath and glimpse of the world, as a flower withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in carbonised air. Had they only let her alone, she would have been happy still.
'Yes,' Damaris sighed, and her eyes had a weary, troubled, introspective look. They saw the blue sea washing the face of the cliffs, the white dogs barking on the strip of yellow sand, the steep path going up and up and up under the olive trees, the old woman in her blue kirtle and a grey hood coming from out the groves of orange and of lemon, a saucepan freshly scoured or linen freshly washed in her horny hands—had all those familiar pictures faded for ever from her sight?