‘Yes; she has behaved very well; we met with a typhoon in the Indian Ocean, and were nearly lost; but she has been patched up and ran home bravely. I have left her at Marseilles to be thoroughly overhauled.’
‘You will have to try her in a match with Geraldine’s "Zostera."’
‘I could not hope to compete with Count Othmar,’ said Geraldine, sullenly; for him the skies were overcast, the sun was clouded, the pretty marble terrace with its gay awnings seemed dark with the gloom of night.
He hated La Jacquemerille which he had been so eager to persuade his friends to inhabit: who could have told that this man would drop on this Mediterranean shore without note of warning, at a moment when he was supposed to be safe on the sandy steppes of Mongolia? ‘As Count Othmar never, I believe, shot anything in his life, I cannot perceive what possible attraction any wild life can have for him,’ he added now, in a tone that was aggressive and impertinent.
Othmar glanced at him with a regard which said much, as he replied simply: ‘I have shot the most noxious animal—man; I have never, I confess, shot wood doves or tame pheasants.’
‘Geraldine will shoot doves all the week,’ said the Princess, with a sense that La Jacquemerille had become interesting. She loved to see men on the brink of a quarrel: sometimes she restrained them from passing the brink; sometimes she did not; sometimes she helped them over it with a little imperceptible touch, light as the touch of a feather, which yet had all the power of electricity.
‘That is modern knighthood,’ said Othmar. ‘I prefer my Mongols.’
‘My brother is English,’ said Lady Brancepeth, to avert disagreeable rejoinders; ‘he always reminds me of the old French caricature: "It is a beautiful day; let us go and kill something."’
‘Othmar is more English than Croat,’ said Napraxine, ‘but he does not kill things, he prefers to paint them.’