‘Conscience is only the unconscious cerebral action of transmitted influence, is it? Oh, I have read the Scientists as well as the Socialists. They are not much more convincing, if one goes to them with an unprejudiced mind——’
‘Does your conscience never tell you that you have done any harm, Princess?’
‘Oh, very often—a great deal,’ she answered candidly. ‘But it does not tell me that I ought not to have done it. I suppose my chain of transmitted influences is not as strong as it should be. Seriously,’ she continued, ‘I do not think hereditary influences are nearly sufficiently allowed for at any time. Think what my people were for ages and ages; the most masterful of autocratic lords who had no single law save their own pleasure, and who, when they helped slay a Tzar, were washing out some blood-feud of their family; pleasure, vice, bloodshed, courage no doubt, rough justice perhaps, were all their lives knew; they lived in the saddle or beside the drinking-horn; they rode like madmen; they had huge castles set in almost eternal snows; they were the judge and the executioner of every wrong-doer in their family or their province; it was not until Letters came in with the great Catherine that the least touch of civilisation softened them, and even after Catherine they were amongst the slayers of Paul; for though they could read Bossuet and Marmontel, their culture was but the merest varnish still. Now, I come from these men and women, for the women were not better than the men. Do you suppose their leaven is not in me? Of course it is, though I am—perhaps as civilised as most people.’
Melville looked at her with a smile.
‘Yes, certainly civilisation has in you, Princess, reached its most exquisite and most supreme development; the hothouse can do no more. You are its most perfect flower. Are we really to credit that you have beneath all that the ferocity and the despotism of a thousand centuries of barbaric Boyars?’
‘I have no doubt something of it,’ said Nadine Napraxine, whilst the dark velvet of her eyes grew sombre and her delicate hand clenched on an imaginary knout. ‘I could use that sometimes,’ she said with significance: Melville understood what she meant.
‘You can hurt more than with the knout, Princess,’ he answered.
Nadine Napraxine smiled. The suggestion pleased her.