Othmar moved impatiently.
'And the two or three who are better than the rest,' he asked; 'those whose lips the bees of Hymettus have really kissed?'
'My dear friend, you know how it is with these also,' sighed Rosselin: 'immense success, immense insouciance, immense enjoyment for the first few years; lovers like the leaves on the trees in midsummer; debts as numerous as the leaves; enormous sums thrown away like waste paper; beauty, health, power, all spent like a rouleau of gold in a fool's hand at Monte Carlo; and then the dégringolade, the apathy of the public, the indifference of the lovers, the persecution of the creditors whose ardour grows as hotly as that of the others cools, the infinite mortifications, humiliations, chagrins, disappointments; then the death from anæmia or from consumption, or the still worse end, which is a fifty-year-long obscurity: Sophie Arnould sweeping out her garret with a two-sous broom! Ah bah! Marry Mlle. Bérarde to one of your cashiers, and buy her a cottage at Neuilly.'
'Do you suppose Desclée or Rachel would have married a clerk, and lived in a little house in the suburbs?' said Othmar with some impatience.
'Ah, who can say? Neither would have stayed with the clerk certainly,' replied Rosselin, lifting up the drooped stalk of one of his picotees and fastening it to its deserted stick. 'It is all a matter of chance and circumstance. Temperament goes for much, but accident counts for more, and opportunity for most. You say yourself, for instance, that Mlle. Bérarde might have lived and died on her island but for some careless words of Madame Nadine and an invitation to St. Pharamond. While we are young life is always inviting us somewhere, and we accept the invitations, without thinking whether they will lead us to Bicêtre or to a quiet cottage garden in our old age. Allons donc! Let us do our best to secure the garden and the sunshine for your little friend from the South. I need not assure you that you shall have my perfect honesty of opinion and my absolute discretion concerning her. Will you come into the house a moment? I picked up yesterday, at a bookstall, a precious little bouquin; nothing less than a copy of the "Terentii Comœdiæ" of 1552 by Roger Payne.'
Othmar went in and admired the bouquin, and stayed a few moments longer, while the evening grew duskier and the scent of the carnations and stocks and great cabbage-roses came richer and sweeter through the open windows into the small rooms, clean and cosy, and raised from the commonplace by the rare volumes which were gathered in them, and the fine pieces of porcelain standing here and there on their wooden shelves.
Then, promising to return on the morrow, he took his leave. Rosselin walked beside him down the little path to the gate. The sun had set and the skies were growing quite dark. The ripple of the Seine water under the sculls of a passing boat was audible in the stillness. From the distance there came the sounds of a violin, and some voices singing the postillions and travellers' chorus from the 'Manon Lescaut' of Massenet.
Rosselin, left alone, leaned over his wooden gate between his acacia hedges, and listened to the voices dying away in the distance, and looked through the soft dusk to where his Paris lay.
'I wonder if he has told his wife?' he thought. 'If not—well, if not, perhaps Madame may not care. She has never cared, why should she care now?'