'I do, indeed. If you had seen the dark side of life, Madame, as I have done, you would think so too.'

'No, never. That young girl has genius, or something very like it, in her face. I will send for her, and show her that there are other fates possible for a young Hebe with the brows of Athene.'

'That would be a cruel kindness if you like,' said Othmar, who had been attentively studying the portrait.

'And that is for once a commonplace remark, my dear Otho. Nothing which takes the band off the eyes is really unkind.'

'I do not know,' said Othmar. 'Great ladies like you have pets which are not the happier fated for the petting; the dog is shaved and frizzed, the bird is caged and killed, the marmoset is adored and neglected; if they were all left to their natural fates they would be less honoured but longer lived. Yonder palms are honoured too, no doubt, by being allowed to stand in a corner of your room behind a lacquered screen and in a gilded basket, but they have neither light nor air, and will be dead, and when they are so, will be replaced in a month.'

She smiled. 'How little you know about it! and what perilous things metaphors always are! The palms go back to their glass-houses and thrive as well as they did before, while other palms take their place in my rooms. You talk a little like a Socialist lecturer; your arguments are all invectives and—what is the logician's word?—pathetic fallacies!'

'Which is the glass-house to which you could send any human being whom you had taken from obscurity and contentment?'

'The glass-house is the world, which is always ready for novelties as the hothouses are ready for new seedlings. How can you tell that this handsome child may not be destined to make the world her slave? Besides, even in the interests of Gros Louis himself, it is as well that the consciousness should come before instead of after.'

'And certainly,' said Loswa, 'no one can say that Gros Louis is a fate meet for this exquisite child?'

Melville hesitated: 'Gros Louis is not a very admirable person; he is an unbeliever, of course very avaricious, and of a rough coarse exterior; but he is a good-tempered man and a very laborious worker. On the whole, worse things might happen to Damaris Bérarde than to live always on her island and rear her children there, as she now rears her poussins and her puppies.'