Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'
'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh, 'when men do not admire me any longer then you will not admire me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as it is—you see so much of me!'
'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most hopeless of her lovers.
'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what you will you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old!'
She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.
'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,' she thought, with a little pang.
'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:
I fear
Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'
There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage or compliment.