Othmar hesitated. His sincerity combated the negative, which a vague sense of loyalty to one absent made him desirous to utter.
'No one after a certain age is happy, my dear,' he answered evasively. 'Illusions are happiness; and in the world which you think must be a fairy tale, we lose them very quickly.'
'I should have thought you were happy,' she said regretfully; that splendid pageantry of life of which she had seen a glimpse seemed to her magical, marvellous, inexhaustible.
'I did not think she was,' she added, with that directness and candour which made her great unlikeness to all of her sex whom he had ever known.
'Why?' he asked abruptly; the supposition annoyed him.
'She looked tired, and as if she were looking for something she did not find.'
The accuracy and divination in the words surprised him. How had this child, who had never before seen any woman of the world, guessed so accurately the perpetual vague desire and as vague dissatisfaction which had always gone with the soul of his wife as a shadow goes through brilliant light?
All her life long Nadège had found the old saw true, familiarity had bred contempt in her; custom had made wisdom seem foolishness, wit seem prose, amusement become tedium, and interest change to apathy. Intimate knowledge of anything, of anyone, had always altered each for her, as the fairy gold changed in mortal hands to withered leaves.
It was no fault of hers; it was not even mere inconstancy of temper; it was rather due to the infinitude of her inexhaustible expectations and the microscopic penetration of her intelligence. The world was small to her as to Alexander.
He knew that neither to her nor to himself had their life together been that poem, that passion, that harmony which they—or he at least—had imagined that it would be. But was not this due only to that doom of human nature which they shared in common with all the rest of mankind? Was it not merely the effect of that lassitude and vague disappointment which must follow on the indulgence of every great passion, simply because in its supreme hours it reaches heights of rapture at which nothing human can remain?