She spoke very sweetly, but with a demure smile, which made Melville feel that there was a great deal more which she did not say out of respect for his sacred calling and his position as her guest.
‘Do not repeat over to me all the stock arguments,’ she said quickly, as he opened his lips; ‘I have heard them all ten thousand times. I have the greatest possible regard for your doctrines, which have satisfied Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Manning, Newman, and yourself, but I have always failed to understand how they did satisfy any of you. But we will not discuss theology. Your poor Rose proves, if she prove anything, that Heaven is not in a hurry to reward its servitors. Perhaps, after all, she might have been wiser if she had married some Jeannot, all over flour or coal dust, and had half a dozen children and fifty grand children.’
‘There is common brute enjoyment all over the earth,’ said Melville, almost losing his temper. ‘It must be well that it should be leavened here and there with lives of sublime self-sacrifice; one heroic or unselfish act raises the whole of human nature with it.’
Nadine Napraxine took a cigarette.
‘There are ten thousand such acts in Russia every year, but they do not produce much effect. Juggernauth rolls on,——’
Melville looked at her quickly.
‘You have a certain sympathy with the people, though you deride my poor Rose.’
‘I do not deride her; I admire her within certain limits. Only, I ascribe her actions more to ignorance and to superstition, whereas you ascribe them entirely to a clear-eyed devotion. Yes; I could have been a revolutionist, I think, only all the traditions of the Platoff and the Napraxine forbid it; and then, as I said to you once before, I do not like Pallida Mors carried about in a hat-box or a sardine-case. It is grotesque. Without jesting,’ she continued, ‘I think if I saw my way to do something truly great or of lasting benefit, I should be ready to sacrifice my life to it; but there is nothing. If a Princess Napraxine joined the Nihilists, she would only cause an intolerable scandal and set an example which would be very injurious to the country at large. Some day, Russia will be in revolt from one end to another, but the day is not yet, and I doubt much that any good will be done when it comes. The evil lies too deep, in the drunkenness, in the lying, in the bestiality——’
She saw a look of surprise on Melville’s face, and continued quickly: