'Penelope thinks that no object in all created nature is more lovely and important than her distaff; naturally Ulysses gets sick of the sight of it,' she said once. 'Why are all women, in love with their husbands, much more miserable than those who detest them? Only because they insist upon giving so much of themselves, that the men grow to view them with absolute terror, as the Strasbourg goose views the balls of maize paste. Love is an art, and ought to be dealt with artistically; in marriage, it has to contend with such insuperable difficulties that it needs to be most delicate, most sagacious, most forbearing, most intelligent, to surmount them. Instead of which, women, usually, who have any love for their husbands at all, look on them as so much property inalienably assigned to them, and treat them as Cosmo dei Medici treated Florence: "Mi piace più distruggerla che perderla!"'
Othmar himself had changed little; men at his years do not alter physically, though great changes, moral and mental, may in brief time transform their feelings and their ambitions.
Women looked at him inquisitively many a day, to try and see whether that great wonder-flower of romantic passion, which had astonished his world in a generation in which such passions are rare, had brought forth contentment or disenchantment. But they could not be sure. No one had ever succeeded in making him unfaithful to this great love, which had been merged in marriage, but no one had ever penetrated his confidence sufficiently to satisfy themselves whether any disillusion had followed on the fulfilment of those dreams and desires, to which he had been willing to sacrifice his life, his honour, and his soul. All that society in general, or his most familiar friends could see, was the outward pageantry of a life in the great world; that life which leaves so little space for thought, so little time for regret, so little leisure for conscience to speak or memory to waken. If he were not entirely content he allowed no one to suspect so; and he did not even like to admit it to his own reflections: yet there were times when life did not seem to him much more complete than it had done before he had attained the supreme desire of his heart; there were times when the old vague indefinite dissatisfaction came back to him—the sense of emptiness which moved the Cæsars of Rome with the world at their feet.
'I suppose it is inevitable,' he said to himself. 'I suppose she is right; nothing on earth is content except a sucking child and an oyster.'
It irritated him that he should be pursued by this foolish and shapeless sense of still missing something, still desiring something, still seeking something unknown and unknowable; but it was there at the bottom of most of his thoughts, at the core of most of his feelings.
'You have had a great misfortune all your life,' Friedrich Othmar said once to him. 'You have always had all your wishes granted you. When a child is indulged in that way he kicks his nurse, when a man is indulged in that way he sulks at destiny. It is human nature.'
'Human nature,' said Othmar, 'according to you and Nadège, is such a consummate fool that it is scarcely worth the bread it eats, much less the elaborate analysis which philosophers have expended on it from Solomon to Renan.'
Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders.
'It is not always a fool,' he made answer; 'but it is, I think, always an ingrate.'
Was he himself an ingrate? Or did he only suffer from that inevitable law of recoil and rebound which governs human life; that cessation of tension which makes a great passion, once satisfied and become familiar, like a bow unstrung?