Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her fidelity through some great ruin, he might, he probably would have aroused the latent forces and sympathies dormant in her character; she would not have given him a stone when he had asked for bread. But in the things of daily life he had found her too often without mercy to have in her mercies much trust.
The conviction that she would never give him the comprehension which he wished made him withhold all other utterances of his deeper emotions and more tender thoughts. He had gone to her in one supreme moment of pain, and he had received a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for ever, a sensitive nature.
She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the moods and minds of others was marred to them by the chill raillery which accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not remember that though to herself the dilemmas and the weaknesses, even the passions which she studied were objects of amused ridicule, they were to those on whom she studied them subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering.
Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to confide in her, because of the inevitable irony with which their confidence was certain to be met. Many a time Othmar himself had longed to lean his head on her knees, and lay bare to her all the contradictions, and longings, and regrets of his soul; but he had never dared to do so, because he had always shrunk from the certain mockery which would, he knew, point through all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her comprehension of human nature made her in one sense the most lenient of auditors; but in another sense she was the most unsparing: she could pardon easily, but she could never promise not to ridicule. That one fact held sensitive natures aloof from her with all the force of a scourge.
'She will deem me such a fool,' he thought often: and then he kept silence.
He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive her, and almost before the train had paused he had entered the saloon carriage in which she had travelled undisturbed since she had left Berlin. There was always in him something of the eagerness after absence of a lover; her mere presence always exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.
She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs and of wadded satin on which she had been lying; she had been rudely awakened by the cessation of the train's movement; the blaze of a lamp was in her eyes; she was impatient, and she yawned.
'Otho! my dear Otho!' she said with petulance, 'why will you always come to meet one at a railway station? Of all the many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd. Nobody's emotions are so poignant that they cannot wait till one comes into the house. I was asleep. What a cold night! Why cannot they devise something which would carry the train straight to one's bedside? All their inventions are very clumsy after all.'
She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and red satin; her eyes were languid with arrested sleep; her tone was irritable and irritating: she scarcely seemed to perceive his presence; the sweet delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all her clothes were always impregnated came to him well known as the accents of her voice. A curious passion of conflicting feeling passed over him; he could have seized her in his arms and cried aloud to her, 'I have given you all my life, do you give me no more than this?' Yet he felt chilled, angered, alienated, silenced for the moment; a feeling which was almost dislike came over him; it seemed to him as if he had poured out all the love of his life upon her and received in return a mere handful of ice and snow. But the inexorable haste and vulgar trivialities of modern exigencies left him no moment for thought or for the expression of it. He could only offer her his hand in silence to assist her to alight, and give her his arm and lead her through the throngs of the Northern Terminus to her own carriage.
He drove with her through the streets to their own house and escorted her to the apartments which were especially hers.