Napraxine looked distressed:
‘You have liked Russia, too, sometimes,’ he said wistfully; ‘and poor little Sachs and Mitz!’
His wife cast upon him a glance of sovereign disdain: ‘There are only two things I like in Russia, they are the steppes and the wolves: that limitless expanse, stretching away to the dim grey sky on every side, and the sight of a pack of the gaunt grey beasts on the snow as one’s sledge flies by; those two things give one a sensation which one does not get elsewhere. But it is monotonous, it soon ceases to move one; the wolves never attack, and the great, awful, white plain never leads to anything better than the posting-house, the samavàr, and the vodki, and the group of drunken coachmen.’
‘The human interest, in a word,’ suggested Melville.
Madame Napraxine smiled:
‘Ah! my dear Monsignore, the human interest is quite as dull as the steppe and quite as ravenous as the wolf! How delightful it must be to be a priest to see all that raw material through rose-glasses!’
‘May not the interest be in subduing the wolf?’ murmured Melville. ‘And even the steppe, under the fostering touch of May dews and June sunlight, will put forth blossoms. Is there no allegory there that Madame Napraxine will deign to accept?’
‘You always say pretty things, in the pulpit or out of it,’ she replied; ‘but you cannot lend me your rose-glasses to see them through, so I fear they do not convince me. The astronomers who are now busy seeing canals in the planet Mars, would see nothing if they had not their glasses; no more would you. You see a soul in a drunken dvornik; that is quite as astonishing, and probably quite as imaginary, as the network of canals in Mars. Will you really eat nothing, Monsignore? Let us go out and sit under that awning there; a bath of sunshine always does one good, and you need not grudge yourself a half hour of leisure. I have no doubt you have been passing the forenoon somewhere with cholera or typhus or some other plague of this sanitary century. You know, Geraldine, that is Monsignore’s way. He is S. Francis Xavier all the morning, and then turns himself inside out and becomes an Abbé galant for society.’
‘I have not been to anything typhoid or choleraic this morning, or I should not be here to endanger your loveliness, Princess,’ answered Melville. ‘I have been where Poverty is—alas! where is she not?—and in our day those who wed with her regard it as a forced marriage, wholly joyless; and we cannot persuade them that there may be graciousness where she dwells if only cleanliness and content will sit down with her.’
‘Oh, Monsignore, it is not only poverty that scares content, I can assure you,’ said Madame Napraxine.