He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which surveyed him with a cynical coldness, as she asked:
'Do you mean that you have written a romance?—or played one?'
There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded so much that he had put off this moment day after day, week after week, month after month.
'Neither,' he answered, curtly. 'I have not talent for the one, nor time and inclination for the other. You may believe me,' he added a little bitterly, 'if I had been foolish enough to tempt fate with either, your indulgence is the last mercy for which I should hope.'
Her eyes still looked at him coldly, steadfastly; with no revelation in her gaze of whether she were surprised, interested, indifferent, or already wearied.
She was leaning back in her long low chair; there was a great deal of lace ruffled at her bosom and on her arms; she wore a long loose satin gown of palest rose effeuillée of which the lights and shadows were very beautiful: her hands were tightly clasped upon her lap; her great pearls gleamed behind the lace; she looked like a woman of the time of the Stuarts or of the Valois. At her elbow stood an immense bowl of Louise de Savoy roses; as she looked at him she drew out one and put it in her bosom. She did not speak or attempt to aid him in any way to continue the conversation which he had begun. She only waited, and as he saw her in that impassible attitude, his task grew harder to him; that sudden sense of her cruelty, of her want of sympathy, of her immovable indifference, which had come to him so sharply on the night of her return from Russia, struck him once more and hardened in him almost to dislike.
Why should he tell her anything? She cared nothing for what he did or what he felt. She dwelt in that serene rarefied atmosphere of her own in which no passions or pains of his could disturb her. If she had once seemed to him to lean from it for a little while to share his emotions, that time was passed, long passed, never to return again.
She was silent many minutes, but she asked no question, threw out no conjecture, did not even by a glance assist him to begin his offered narrative. If she would only have said something—anything—it would have broken the ice at least. But the marble bust of herself which stood near her, carved by Hildebrand, was not more mute than she; and she was quite motionless, her hands clasped on another rose with which she toyed.
He was angered with himself to feel that his cheeks grew warm, and that his voice was nervous as he said at last:
'I regret that the portrait is gone to the Trocadéro, because the original of it is living near Paris, and it may lead to comment and conjecture which may be injurious to her; she is scarcely more than a child, and she will be an artist; she is better without the attention of the public until she challenges it directly.'