Othmar

by Ouida

'Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa's works about to be opened there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a single master are very popular now. That head is one of the best things he has done. It will come back to you in three months. Cannot you live without it till then?'

Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy.

'I would, of course, have lent it,' he said with a little hesitation.

'I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,' she said with a cold glance at him. 'You do not appear to have missed those.'

'I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung. If you will pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of what you wish to do than my servants know—and to know it first through them.'

'If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know that people will object, I never ask them what they wish.'

'The method has the merit of simplicity.'

He felt exceedingly angered; in the first place he did not care to have the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the original was living so near Paris with no friend but himself, and in the second place he indignantly resented being treated like a cypher in his own houses; he never permitted himself to intrude on her personal arrangements—could she not respect his?

Now and then, and above all of late, there had been something high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment of things which concerned him, and on which she did not consult him; something which made him fancy that in the deepest depth of the thoughts and feelings there was occasionally the remembrance that the great race of princes from whom she herself descended would have deemed her alliance with one of the princes of finance a gross mésalliance.