‘It is a refuge; but myself, I would never have the religious life embraced only for its safety. I never approve of looking at Deity as a superior sort of chaperon. If all the soul be not aspirant of its own accord to a spiritual sacrifice the vows are a mere shibboleth.’
‘What soul shrined in a healthy body would aspire to the cloister at sixteen?’ thought Othmar, as the Princess said, ‘All this is very interesting, Monsignore, but it does not explain how a protégée of my neighbours, the high and mighty de Vannes, comes to be rowing in a boat full of oranges.’
‘Ah, that I cannot tell you,’ said Melville, ‘but I believe her foster-mother has a bastide near Nice; it may be she is with her foster-mother now. I knew her well when she was a little child, living with the old Marquise de Creusac in that extreme but refined and reserved poverty of which only the old noblesse has the secret. The Marquise was one of the sweetest and most pious women I have ever had the honour to know; but she could, if necessary, have withered a king into the earth with a glance. The child promised to be like her, but had something bouillante and impetuous, which had come to her from her father, and which, beneath her high-bred manner and her chastened tone, made her, as a baby, intensely interesting.’
‘Dear Monsignore,’ said the Princess, with a little impatience, ‘surely you have mistaken your vocation, and should have been a writer of novels; you draw portraits with the skill of Octave Feuillet.’
‘I have only said what I have seen,’ said Melville, good-humouredly. ‘Probably Feuillet only does the same.’
The boat with the oranges had passed ahead towards the shore, its Venetian red side was dipping in the trough of the waves, its old striped sail was swaying in the wind; there was a speck of gold in the sun where the oranges were.
‘You had better rescue this distressed damsel and marry her, Othmar!’ said the Princess Napraxine, with an unkind little laugh. ‘She seems made on purpose for you. She has the unsullied descent which you are always sighing for, and you certainly can dispense with a dot.’
For answer he only looked at her; but she understood his answer.
Melville vaguely understood also that in his innocent praises of his Cinderella he had unwittingly struck a false chord, and he was too much a man of the world not to be grieved at his involuntary failure in tact. The boat meanwhile was fast growing to a mere speck of red and yellow colour, soon to be wholly lost in the blue radiance of sea and sky.
‘You have at times bought some Greuzes, if I remember,’ continued the Princess. ‘They are pretty, soft, conventional, but I do not know that your gallery is much the richer for them.’