'I think I could make the world care,' she said, with a curious mingling of dreaminess and decision, of ardour and of doubt in her tone. 'Even your wife said I might do so—it is something outside myself, beyond myself. I do not mean any vanity or folly. It is something one has, as the nightingale has its song, and the lemon flower its odour. If they would hear me—as your Lady heard? How could I make them hear me?'
Othmar was silent.
Then he added almost cruelly, but cruelty seemed to him kindness:
'My wife forgot that she had heard you five minutes afterwards: so perhaps would the world. And if so, what then?'
'At least I should have tried.'
The divine obstinacy of genius spoke in the words. Better failure and oblivion than oblivion without effort.
'If only I could try?' she repeated with imploring prayer: to her he seemed the master of the world, as utterly as Agrippa or Augustus seemed so to the Roman girls who saw them pass from palace to temple, 'I know it would be only interpretation; but I feel their words say so much to me that I surely could interpret them, aloud, so that I could move some to feel them as I do.'
He knew she meant the words of those poets which had taken so strong and firm a hold upon her imagination, read as she had read them in the glory of the southern light, between the sea and sky.
'Perhaps you could,' he answered reluctantly. 'But if you did, what would be your fate? You would die like Aimée Desclée. My wife likened you to her.'