'Oh, the cruelty of a priest! Decidedly you will not let her come to us if you can help it. Well, we will go to her. I owe her an apology.'
Melville trusted to his usual experience of his hostess; he knew that with her, very often, a caprice ardently desired at sunset was forgotten by sunrise; that, in default of opposition, such a mere whim as this would most likely expire as soon as conceived. He said nothing more to her, and Loswa took his sketch down from the easel.
'I fear you are angry with me, Monsignor,' he murmured to Melville, to whom he was always courteous and deferential. 'Indeed, but for the challenge that Madame Nadège cast at me, I should not have ventured to find out your inviolate isle.'
'There is no harm done,' said Melville curtly. 'You will not find there either Gretchen or Graziella.'
Othmar had no sympathy with this new fancy.
'With all the world at your feet, what can you want with a fisher-girl?' he said, when they were alone, to his wife, who replied:
'She may be original and amuse me. There is hardly anything original in these days. One never sees anything; and I do not think she is a fisher-girl. She may even be a genius—an Aimée Desclée—a Rachel.'
'And do you think it is better to be a Desclée than to live and die, a happy wife and mother, en bonne bourgeoise?'
'Oh, my dear, it is you who are bourgeois if you see anything enviable in the prose of Fate! You may be sure that, if she be a genius, and I help to open her prison doors, I am only the instrument of Destiny. Someone else would open them if not I.'
'I thought you always ridiculed the idea of Destiny?'