Othmar

by Ouida

'No; we shall make him impossible.'

'You will create one more déclassée, then, when there are already so many!'

'What? By seeing her once?'

'Yes,' replied Melville with a certain sternness. 'Once is enough. Discontent is born at a touch. Content is a thing which no one can create; but discontent almost anyone can bring about with a word. Merely to see you, Madame, would be to render this poor child wretched and ashamed all the rest of her days. I mean no compliment; only a fact. You float in the very empyrean of culture; you can only make this young barbarian conscious of her barbarianism. What is the curse of our age? That every class is wretched because it is straining forever on tiptoe, striving to reach into the class above it.'

'Dear Monsignor, I think they always did. Colbert stretched the draper's yard measure till it reached the throne, and Wolsey stood on the chopping-block till he was tall enough to touch hands with king and pope. It is nothing new, though modern democracy thinks it is.'

'The just ambition of the man of genius is not the restless monomania of the déclassée.'

'Who can tell what ambition may lie under this Phrygian cap?' said his tormentor, as she looked once more at the sketch of Damaris. 'Dear Monsignor, I am so delighted when you become a little cross! It makes us feel that, after all, you are really human!'

'I am exceedingly cross,' said Melville; 'or, to speak more truly, infinitely distressed.'

'After all, Monsignor, it is not absolutely just to this involuntary recluse never to give her an occasion to estimate Gros Louis at his actual worth. According to what you and Loswa say, there are the gases of revolt already smouldering in her; surely it will be better for them to take flame before than after.'

'There are a great many lives,' said Melville, with a tinge of personal bitterness, 'in which those gases are never extinct, yet in which they are, nevertheless, not allowed to come to the surface and take fire. It may very well be so with hers.'