Melville answered with a sigh:
'May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some other?'
'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 'I think with you; the strongest argument (if any are strong) in favour of the future development of the soul, is the absolute impossibility for anybody with any average mind to be content with what he or she finds in human existence. Life is a pretty enough picture for people like ourselves; it is sometimes a pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but it is all wonderfully unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few hours of passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and insufficiency of it all. We have ideals which may be only remembrance, but if not must surely be prevision; ideals which, at any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything which belongs to earth.'
Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of wistful regret. It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the ennuyée which moved her. She had had her own way in life, and the success of it had become monotonous.
'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very gay; 'I suppose it must be the soul in us; that odd, unquiet, dissatisfied, nameless thing inside us, which is always crying, "Give, give, give!" and never gets what it wants. Our discontent must be the proof of something in us meant for better things, just as the eternal revolutions of Paris are the proof of its people's genius. What a night it is! It wants Lorenzo and Jessica, but they are not here. There are flirtations and intrigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are not of our world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'
Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her guests, who were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, as the sounds of music, in the ever-youthful 'Invitation à la Valse,' called them, with midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase Melville strayed away by himself through the moonlit aisles of roses.
'Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of pleasure,' he thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly balanced than the wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will ever believe. Perhaps in life, as they said to-day that it is in love, hunger is a happier state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo had never married Jessica, he would have written sonnets to her all his life, as Petrarca wrote them to Laura! The Lady of Amyôt is the most interesting woman I have ever known, but she is the one person on earth capable of making me doubt the faith that I have lived and hope to die for; when I am amongst the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa, I can still believe in the human soul; but when I am with her I doubt—I doubt—I doubt! She is as exquisitely organised as this gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams; but she believes that she will have only her one brief passage on earth like the gloxinia—the glory of a day—and alas! who shall prove that she is wrong? When she holds my creed in the hollow of her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a daisy that is dead!'
CHAPTER III.
'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on her thirty-second birthday.