Othmar

by Ouida

'Did I not say that men are cowards?'

'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'

She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.

'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "Fis anus, et tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the perruquiers let nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming—more charming than the girls who are just out.'

'I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you will always be charming, and you will never be old.'

'One would think you were my lover!'

'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'

'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.'

'Or some exceptional reward.'

'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile. 'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly expenditure. "Ah—ouiche, Madame!" said one of the peasants at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two spoons in one soup-pot?—you only quarrel about the onions." That is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not make the least difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the spoons.'