‘I promise you I will never be compromised,’ she had said to her father a few months after her marriage; and he, a very easy and philosophic man of the world, had answered:
‘I am sure you mean what you say; but the test of your resolution will come whenever you shall meet the person who pleases you. At present you laugh at them all.’
‘I do not think I shall ever care,’ she had said, with much accurate knowledge of herself.
Othmar, momentarily lava, had thrown himself in vain against this indifference; the ice of her temperament had not changed under the volcanic fires of his. All those airy nothings, that capricious friendship, that unrecompensed position of servitude which she offered him, he would have none of, and told her so with passion and force.
‘And I will have no melodramatic passions to disturb me,’ she had said. ‘They are absurd. They are out of date. They are tiresome.’
Wounded and incensed, he had taken her at her word more completely and instantly than she had intended; and she had not known whether to feel regret or relief. She had felt a good deal of triumph. And now he had returned, unchanged in appearance, handsomer even for that duskier hue which the desert sun had left on the marble of his features; and she, and he himself, were silently wondering—was she glad?
He thought she was annoyed; Napraxine thought so too; Geraldine alone, with a lover’s self-paining penetration, felt that life had grown sweeter and more stimulating to her, that her languid interest in existence had grown quicker of pulse and more content with its own atmosphere since her husband had read aloud the name of Othmar on the pencilled card.
Perhaps, thought he also, with a lover’s self-torture, what he had found in her of indifference, of disdain, of lack of sympathy, had been due to the absence of the sole person who possessed the power to touch her dormant emotions.
In reality, Madame Napraxine at that moment felt no more than the vague expectation and gratification of a spectator at a theatre, who sees a drama complicate itself, mingled with a certain sense of curiosity as to why Othmar sought to display to her so conspicuously his escape from her sorcery. She was not mortified; she was accustomed to change her adorers into her friends, and she was of a nature too integrally proud to be capable of small things. She only wondered—and doubted a little.
Could any one who had loved her once fail to love her all his life?