'Elle nous a embrassés, vois-tu,' he murmured, 'comme on embrasse les petits pauvres!'
'Les petits pauvres,' whom he had seen in the Tuileries or the Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with eager tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the mothers had no food to give them except such fond caresses. Watching those happy hungry children, he had said more than once to his sister enviously, 'Si maman nous embrassait comme ça!'
And then they had always kissed each other to make up for the caresses which they did not obtain.
And now she too had kissed them 'comme ça!' They were not sure whether they had done something very wrong or something very good to move her so; one or the other they were sure it must have been.
As the children went from her presence a note was brought her which briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregorievna had arrived in Paris from Russia to consult some famous physician.
'As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,' she murmured with passion, as she tore the note in two. Must this mummied saint even change all the habits of her life and quit her country to be present here, when for the first time a rupture open and irrevocable had come between herself and Othmar, when in a few days' time, if it were not doing so already, all Paris would be speaking of the cause of their disunion!
All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath her sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this unlooked-for arrival of her bitterest enemy. More than once she had said in her heart, 'If ever I have misfortune, Lobow Gregorievna will be there to triumph in it.' And now she was there, within a few streets, residing in a religious house of Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre, which seemed to her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die.
'Do I grow nervous and hysterical?' she asked herself in scorn.
She who had meted out destiny to so many, who had thought that it was only the timid and foolish who let life go ill with them, who had regarded the sorrows of sentiment and emotion with an indulgent contempt, felt with anger against herself that such a trivial thing as the advent of a woman who hated her could affect her nerves and appear to her a presage of ill. With her delicate scorn and her consummate indifference she had turned aside all the efforts of others to move her or influence her; she had never known either apprehension or regret; it had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the first time, emotions which were beyond her own control affected her, and a sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled her with the sharp pain of irritated impotence.
She knew the world too well not to know that all the women who had vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly wooed her, would take pleasure and find solace in every whisper which should tell them of the offence to her pride; and she knew the world too well not to know also that there is no such thing as privacy in it, that all which she had learned through Michel Obrenowitch society would find out and gossip exaggerate; and that the whole of the society throughout Europe which she had dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long, would know that she—she—Nadège Feodorowna—was deserted for a peasant girl taken from the streets.