Othmar did not reply; he was looking at the exquisite grace of her form, the tea-rose tint of her cheeks. Was it possible that she could be the mother of two stout, ugly, Tartar-faced boys? It seemed to him a profanation; a hideous incongruity. He did not like to think of it. If she had had a child at all it should have been some blossom-like creature, sharing her own grace as the catkin shares the willow’s. The subtlest charm about her was that ethereality, as of a virginal goddess, which was blent in her with all the finesses of seduction and of mind. The boldest man felt that in Nadine Napraxine the senses had hardly more empire than in the ivory Venus of the Greeks.
The eyes of Othmar dwelt on her now yearningly, sombrely, wistfully.
‘It is of no use,’ he said, abruptly. ‘I did wrong to come here. If you wish for men who can, whilst they adore you, sit and drink chocolate and talk epigrams, seek elsewhere; I am not one of them. I can wear a mask, but it must be of iron, not of velvet.’
‘The iron mask was of velvet,’ said she, correcting him, unmoved by the repressed passion in his voice. ‘All our illusions vanish under the electric light of history, and the iron mask is one of them. I daily expect to hear that Marie Antoinette was never guillotined, but succumbed at seventy to dropsy at Schönbrunn; we know it is proved that Jeanne d’Arc married and died, bonne bourgeoise, at Orleans, and her family enjoyed a pension for three generations from the town. It is very distressing, but it is all proved from the archives. Why shouldn’t you drink chocolate? Perhaps you do not like it. Men like nothing that has sugar in it, except flattery. Ring. They will bring you anything else.’
Othmar looked at her without speaking. Something of the impotent rage against her with which he had left her in Paris awoke in him under the sting of her ever dulcet tones, in which a little tone of mockery could be felt rather than heard.
He rose abruptly.
‘Have you never loved anyone?’ he asked.
She lifted her eyebrows with impatience and astonishment.
‘Vous voila emballé! Dear Othmar, I should like you so much if you would not always revert to that old theme. You are a man of the world, or you ought to be one. Be amusing, even be instructive if you like; I do not mind being instructed, but do not be romantic. Nobody is nowadays; not even the novelists.’