A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possibility suggested itself.
If he were like other men, after all? Well—why not? Would she care greatly? She did not know. All she was conscious of at the moment was that sense of astonishment, of affront, of loss, with which a woman feels for the first time that her power over any man has had its fullest sway, and has begun to decline and waste.
It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it.
'As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanôt!' she thought with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion.
But it recalled to her sharply, painfully, what the world never had recalled to her hitherto; that the time must come to her, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement every woman who has ever reigned.
There was nothing said by either which had the least actual coldness or offence in it: yet the sense of offence and coldness was between them, and many times he smarted under some such touch of ridicule or of reproof from her as had used to make Platon Napraxine stand like a chidden schoolboy before her. He was neither so blunt of nerve nor so dull of comprehension as Napraxine had been; and he had an impatient revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for his wife's delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were a part of her temper; as natural to her as its talon to the falcon, as its pungent odour to the calycanthus. He did not attribute too serious a meaning to them, knowing that her lips were often merciless when her heart was kind. Yet they irritated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that his character is lessened or his opinions regarded with indifference by the woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an heroic light.
'My dear Otho,' she said a little irritably one day when he had answered her with wandering attention, 'you are very pensive and distrait since you came to Russia. What have you been doing in the solitudes of a Parisian summer? You look as if you had been writing an epic and had failed in it.'
'Death is never gay or agreeable,' said Othmar; 'and I have been in its company.'
'My dear, when death does not come until our friends are over eighty, surely we can see his approach without surprise or any very great regret. Besides, I never knew that Baron Friederich was remarkably sympathetic to you. You used to quarrel with him about most things. But you have such a curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are dead, the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you when they were living.'