'Some one will tell her if you do not,' he said with some significance. 'Pardon me if I say too much, but I dislike concealments; they are usually unwise and seldom profitable. Chevreuse is not a vale in Venus or Polaris, that we can be sure no one will ever see your protégée!'
'Anyone may see her,' said Othmar, with annoyance and hauteur. 'But to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten demands a courage of which I frankly confess myself not the possessor.'
'Humph!' said Rosselin with dubious accent: he was not satisfied. It seemed to him that embarrassing complications would of necessity grow up out of so much needless reticence. Othmar, he thought, was most probably not aware himself of all the various and confused motives which disposed him to silence on the name of Damaris.
'She is not of a facile character,' he thought, recalling all he had ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine in her youth. 'But when there is a nettle in question it is always best to grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent as they say, the whole thing would be of infinitesimal insignificance to her, unless concealment were to lend it an importance not its own, as some shadows can be thrown on a white wall so as to make a beetle loom large as an ox.'
'Chevreuse, moreover,' continued Othmar, 'is a place that no one ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few weeks when Dampierre is occupied, not a soul of our world ever goes there. If she mean or hope to become famous with the fame you decry, she is best there in solitude; if, on the contrary, she fail it will be still well that none should know her efforts who would not pity them. My wife is like the Latins, she has no altar to pity; she despises it. If the world ever applaud Damaris Bérarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall to her the prophecy she made at St. Pharamond.'
'If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows the world,' said Rosselin. 'I thought she led it?'
'She does lead it: but she has great contempt for those who fail in it. When a lamb falls from fatigue on the Australian plains the shepherd walks on and leaves it to its fate. Those who fail seem to my wife as the fallen lambs do to the shepherd: that is all.'
'Damaris Bérarde will not fail,' said Rosselin, with a sense of anger and of triumph in her.
'Aimée Desclée did not fail—but she died.'
'Damaris will not die; she is too strong; but she may break her heart over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks his over bad roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would be if it were like the world these youths and maidens see in their dreams!'