Weak women, indulgent women, women who were afraid and wanted pardon for their own secrets, these women did these things, aided their husbands' amours, received their husbands' favourites, helped their husbands to conventional disguises of equivocal situations, but that rôle, was not hers.
'And he came from this girl to me in Russia;' she thought with that physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and which men never understand.
One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the wall the sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space between the places of the Corot and the Aivanoffsky. He rang for the major-domo.
'Who has taken the portrait from that place?' he asked; he feared the entrance of some thief from the gardens.
The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he had taken it down that morning by command of his mistress, and had sent it whither she had directed him to do; to a certain gallery recently built on the Trocadéro.
'You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,' said Othmar; and dismissed the official without more comment.
As soon as he could be admitted to his wife's presence, he went to her and opened the subject with scanty preface.
'Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by Loswa out of my study to the new gallery on the Trocadéro,' he said, when he had made her his usual greeting. 'Is that true?'
'Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up the Louvre or the Luxembourg!'
'May I venture to inquire your reasons?'