‘If the honey be not in the hive it ought to be eaten. There is a landing-place in my grounds, and the house is not more than a quarter of a mile distant, if such a distance do not alarm you. I know that you are no great pedestrian, Princess.’
‘Why should one be when there are so many more agreeable modes of progression? On ne doit jamais se punir pour rien.’
‘I have walked twenty miles for my own pleasure very often,’ said Lady Brancepeth, who approached them.
‘Oh, but you are English; we were just saying that all English people are like beavers, you must be sawing and drilling and building and dragging something or other all through the length of your days. I could walk, I think I could walk right across Russia, if there were any wise object to be obtained by it, but simply to walk, as a mad dog runs, from a sort of blind impulsion!—no, that is beyond me.’
‘You are such a curious union, Nadine, of languor and energy, of indifference and of potentialities,’ began her friend.
‘My energy is latent,’ she said, interrupting her. ‘I do not waste it on every-day trifles, as you waste yours. You always use forty-horse power to boil an egg or make a box of wax matches. That is an English idea of energy.’
‘Your grandmother, the Princesse d’Yssingeaux, was English by birth.’
‘So was Othmar’s mother. That is why he and I have something of the beaver in us, but calmed, controlled, kept in reserve; we do not waste our time and timber damming up threads of water, but we shall be ready if an inundation occur.’
‘Othmar, perhaps,’ said Lady Brancepeth.