'Je les connais!' thought Blanchette, with something of Nadine's contempt for the sex. 'When they can drink out of a hundred silver goblets they are always crazy for a brown cottage pipkin. They are always like that.'
She attached no importance to the discovery that he walked not unaccompanied in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse; but the knowledge that he did so had embarrassed him; that was enough to make it delightful to her.
It amused her to be at Amyôt when its mistress was absent. 'Nous sommes très bien installés,' she said carelessly to Othmar, not even going through the form of inquiring as to his wishes, and she and her party stayed on for the rest of the week. He was displeased, but he could not tell them to go. His wife could do that sort of thing; he could not. It seemed to him impossible to make even self-invited guests realise that they were not welcome. Blanche de Laon thought his compliance argued fear of her, and was more diverted than before.
'Perhaps he is dying to get back to Chevreuse!' she thought with much amusement. 'But he is too courteous to turn us out; he belongs to the last century.'
She was not grateful for his courtesy; she, rather, despised him for it.
One morning she took a fancy to wander over the house by herself; it was an immense building, and to visit it thoroughly would have taken more hours than she gave it minutes; but even in her rapid and cursory fashion, she covered a good deal of ground.
'It is really a royal place,' she thought. 'We have nothing like it. La Finance gets everything.'
She disliked Othmar; he was everything that she detested in man: he was reserved, punctilious, prejudiced; he had a distant manner of cold courtesy, which was not at all of her own generation; he was grave, often preoccupied, and always blind to her own attractions: yet as she went over she wished that she had married him.
'Quel diable de vie je lui aurais donné!' she thought with complacency, and how amusing it would have been!