'I dare not disturb you longer to-night,' he said with a certain bitterness of tone which he could not control. 'The children wished to remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow them to do so; I know how you despise undisciplined feeling.'
She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove her fur wrappings, whilst she stood in the delicious warmth and light of the rooms where thousands of hothouse roses were gathered together in welcome of her return, filling the hot air with their fragrance.
'Do you mean that for satire?' she said with a little yawn. 'Do not try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children are certainly much better in bed. I will go and look at them after I have had a bath. I am very tired. Goodnight.'
She gave him a sleepy sign of dismissal, then chid her women for being slow. Had they her pine-bath ready?—there was no bath so good after fatigue and cold.
He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the coldness which came over him towards her: coldness born from her own as the frosts of the earth come from the cold of the atmosphere. His adoration of her had been too integral a part of his life for her touch, her voice, her glance, not to have a certain empire over him which no other woman would ever obtain.
In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her presence. She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene and almost kind, but the children were there: they were not alone five minutes. Later, she gave audience to all the great faiseurs, whose intelligence had been busied inventing marvels of costume for her for the winter season. Later yet, there came some of her intimate friends and some of her most devoted courtiers.
It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments there were hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry air and amidst the innumerable roses it was hard to believe that it was the thirtieth of November. People came and went, laughed and chattered; she wrote notes, sent messages, telegraphed many contradictory orders to her tradespeople; the day was crowded and entertaining; there was a certain stimulant, even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris.
Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner. Béthune dined there, and four or five other persons, who had called and been invited that afternoon. The day was a type of all other days of her life.
Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams he had dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it; yet who was more absorbed by it? Who was less able to live without it? She always spoke with her lips of the fatigue of society, but, as he thought angrily, she was not so weary that she was ever willing to forsake it. All the year round it was about her. Every season saw her where its fashion, its pastimes, its flatteries, were most largely to be found. Without that atmosphere of adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would have been lost. The world was a poor affair, no doubt, not anything like what if might be were people more inventive and more courageous. She had said so a hundred times; but still there was nothing better than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak-tree, or to sit alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully Prudhomme, would not be any improvement on it, though it might be more philosophic.