Her first impulse was to give the instant refusal for which her women looked; but her next was to wait, to hesitate: perhaps to consent; the strangeness of such a visit outweighed with her its insolence and intrusion. She disliked all things which were sensational, emotional, romantic, ridiculous; and yet the more uncommon circumstances, the more singular situations of life, had always an attraction for her. Curiosity to penetrate the motive of it, and to see with her own eyes this creature whom she despised, was stronger with her than her haughty amaze at such a request, whilst the morbid love of analysis and of penetrating to the depths of all emotions, and of playing on them, which is common to the century, and in her reached its extreme indulgence and development, impelled her to allow the entrance of Damaris into her presence, that she might see the issue of a situation of which the peculiarity allured her.
'If she come to assassinate me, it will at least be a new sensation,' she thought, with her habitual irony.
The women felt afraid: they never dared to name any visitants to her whom they had not previously been directed to receive; they awaited her commands in apprehension.
'Can he have sent her?' she wondered; then she rejected the supposition. He was too well-bred for that. What, then, could bring this girl to her?
Her first impulse was to have her thrust out shamefully by her household, the next was that intellectual inquisitiveness which was the strongest characteristic of her mind. Despised, contemned, abhorred as this girl was by her, she yet felt a strange desire to see and to examine what she believed possessed the power to reign, if only for a passing season, over the thoughts and the feelings of Othmar. She herself had no more doubt that Damaris was her husband's mistress than she had that the roses she wore in her breast were her own. But the disgust, the offence, the aversion which she felt, in common with all other women, before such a rivalry were overborne in her by the psychological interest of the moment which it offered.
Always mindful to preserve her dignity before her inferiors, she said to her chief woman-in-waiting:
'It is a young girl whom I knew at St. Pharamond; yes, say that she may come to me for ten minutes.'
The woman obeyed, and in a moment more Damaris stood between the satin curtains of the doorway: a dark, tall, slender figure, with the light shining on the dusky gold of her hair, the changing painful colour of her cheeks.
The women, at a sign from their mistress, withdrew and closed the door behind her. Othmar's wife made no gesture, said no syllable which could help her. She remained seated afar off, the intense light of the room reflected from the many mirrors in their silver frames showing her delicate cold features, the pale rose satin of her sweeping gown, her reclining attitude, languid, haughty, motionless.
The girl trembled from head to foot.