'To see me can do her no good' he said to himself; 'and it may make others do her harm. If she be left alone she may learn to live for art: it is a safe and kindly friend.'
One day, when he was at work in his little cabinet du travail, his wife came to him there for a moment on her way to her carriage. It was his favourite room; it opened on one side into the library, on the other into the gardens; the peacocks would walk in from without when the doors stood open, and the green gloom of an avenue of coniferæ stretched away immediately in front of its steps. It was here that the sketch made by Loswa hung betwixt a woodland glade painted by Corot, and a sloop becalmed in the Sound painted by Aivanoffsky.
It was rarely that Nadine deigned to enter there; she paused there now for a moment with an open note in her hand, which she had received that instant from Prince Hohenlohe, requesting her intercession with Othmar concerning some matter of German interest which did not brook delay.
It was soon disposed of. He wrote a line and gave it to her to do as she pleased with it, and looked at her with wistfulness. It was the first time he had seen her that day; it was four o'clock, she was about to attend a musical gathering at the Prince of Lemberg's hotel in the Boulevard Joséphine, convened to hear the first execution by illustrious amateurs of a pastoral cantata of his own composition on the theme of Ruth.
'You are going to the Ruth?' asked Othmar.
'Yes; I wonder you are not. Music used always to draw you out of your hole like a lizard.'
'I have a great deal to do,' he replied; 'and, besides, how many times have you not enforced on me the bourgeois absurdity of accompanying you anywhere?'
'You need not accompany me. You can come by yourself. Certainly I think it does look absurd to see two people always together like two dogs in a coupling-chain.'
Othmar sighed a little impatiently.
'Lemberg has chosen a very bourgeois theme; surely very archaic and ill adapted for his audience. The emotions of Ruth will seem to your world something as ridiculous as a gown of the time of Marie Amélie!'