‘You beg my question,’ retorted Lady Brancepeth; ‘you know very well that I am not talking of your husband.’
‘Then you ought to be if you be not! You are a very immoral woman to recommend me to care for anybody else,’ said the Princess with her soft, quiet little laugh, that was as pretty as the coo of a wood dove but by no means so harmless.
‘You would exasperate a saint,’ cried her companion.
‘I never met one,’ said Nadine. ‘The nearest approach to one that I know is Melville, and I can put him out of temper.’
‘I have no doubt you can,’ said Lady Brancepeth; ‘I think you would anyone; you do such immeasurable harm, and are all the while as demure as a rabbit, and as innocent-looking. My dear Princess, you are the cruellest woman that lives! Flocon de Neige they call you. They might much more appropriately call you Goutte de Morphine. You enervate, and you kill, and all the while, what do you care? You care no more than the morphia does.’
‘Did the ball bore you too so dreadfully that you are so very unkind? A rabbit and morphia! Your similes are mixed, my dear. I am never a flirt; a flirt is a very vulgar thing. No man lives, I can assure you, who could say he ever had a word of encouragement from me. That is not at all my way.’
‘No!’ said Lady Brancepeth, bitterly, ‘your way is merely to look at men and destroy them, and then laugh a little when they are spoken of: I never reproached you with ordinary coquetry; I reproach you with something much more subtle, arrogant, cold, and cruel. There is a gum of the East advertised which does not kill flies, only attracts them, so that they cling to it by millions, and hang there stupidly in a throng till they die. That gum is very like your power over your lovers; it is just as passive, just as deadly.’
‘The gum and I were made as we are by nature. Blame nature. The men and the flies would do worse if they did not do that. And pray do not talk about my lovers; I have none.’
‘You have no serfs in Russia, but you have moujiks; and it is still much the same thing, as far as their submission goes.’