CHAPTER II.
As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and approached them.
'Is the Court over? At what decision has it arrived?' said the master of Amyôt as he saluted the party and kissed the hand of his wife with a graceful formality of greeting.
'It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to come to any,' returned the châtelaine. 'We have said many pretty things about love, Béthune in especial; but we met Lubin with Lisette loitering behind their cows, and I fear the living commentary was truer to nature than all our doctrines.'
'The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away a cow and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Béthune. 'He crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us: we were all sadly in want of one.'
'Could you not agree then? Surely you chose a very simple subject?'
'It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It is sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent d'Aubiac to the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his lips, the same thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the femelle de l'homme sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry? You will admit that a vast field of the most various emotions separates the two kinds of passion?'
'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell and Sir John Suckling's verses.'
'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not know why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not absurd.'