Her voice trembled a little over the last word; she added after a moment,
'He speaks of her sometimes—of you never.'
'Ah!'
Othmar understood the meaning of that, though his companion did not.
The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had spoken of a lady who was nothing to him, had seemed even to her unworldly ignorance something which Othmar would not like. She, who had only seen the homely lives of the toilers of the sea and soil, with their primitive passions and their single-minded ideas, did not dream of the easy relations and the elastic opinions which exist in the great world, of the friendships which have all the grace of love without its fatigue and its bondage, of the influence which brilliant women can exercise over the minds and lives of men, without giving in return one iota of their own freedom or feeling one pulse of tenderness. All those intricate motives, and half-dissolute, half-delicate, liberties which prevail in society, were to her unknown, unimaginable. She could understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or should in an hour of hatred slay what they were jealous of, or what had robbed them of their love. All the simple deep undivided emotions of life were intelligible to her and aroused response in her nature, but the refinements of caprice and of fancy, the subtleties of cultured minds playing with passions which they were too languid and too hypocritical to share, these were altogether unintelligible to her.
In her short life she had not lived with the rude labouring folk who had been her sole companions, without knowing that men could be faithless and women also. But in the only people she had ever known, fidelity had had a rude and literal interpretation, and infidelity had often been roughly chastised by a blow of the knife, or the scourge of a rope's end. All the refined gradations of inconstancy in the great world were wholly unimaginable by her.
'You will have to live ten years more before you can play in Sardou's pieces,' Rosselin had said one day to her; 'as yet you must remain with the poets, with the eternal children, with the eternal Naturkinder.'
'Perhaps,' Rosselin had added to himself, 'she will never be able to play Dora, or Froufrou, only Adrienne Lecouvreur, or Marie Stuart. She has a character cast on broad bold antique lines; simple and profound feelings alone are natural to her. The intricacies of complex emotion, and the contempt born of analysis, are not intelligible to her. She would understand why the Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so violently in "L'Etrangère," but she would not understand why Froufrou vacillates so helplessly between her family and her lover.'
She looked wistfully now at Othmar, afraid that she had displeased him, yet urged on by the unconquerable attraction which the character of his wife exercised over her:
'Why has she so much power over people?' she asked in a low voice.