‘I am so perfectly happy here,’ she answered, with hesitation; ‘but——’
She was not actuated by the sentiment which he attributed to her hesitation; she infinitely preferred the country to the city, as all meditative and poetic tempers do, and the little she had seen of the great world at Millo made her dread her entry into it in Paris. What she wished, but lacked the courage to say, was, that she perceived that the country did not satisfy him himself. She was not so dull of comprehension that she did not see the melancholy of her husband, the listless indifference, the unspoken ennui, which spoiled his years to him, and left him without energy or interest in life. She could discern the wound she knew not how to cure, and Friederich Othmar in his conversations with her had repeatedly assured her that the vie de province stifled the intelligence of a man as moss grows over the trunk of a tree.
‘I am so happy here,’ she answered now with hesitation, ‘but still——’
‘But still you are a daughter of Eve,’ he added with indulgence. ‘My poor child, it is quite natural, you are so young; all young girls long for the life of the world. It robs them of their lilies and roses, it draws bistre shadows under their eyes, it makes them old before they are twenty, but still they kiss the feet of their Moloch! I do not think, though, that you will ever be hurt by the world yourself. You are too serious, and have at once too much humility and too much pride: they are safe warders at the door of the soul; you will not easily become a mondaine.’
‘What is the difference?’
‘In the world, when she belongs to it, a woman crushes her soul as she crushes her waist; she is a butterfly, with the sting of an asp; she wastes her brain in the council-chambers of her tailors, and her time in a kaleidoscope of amusements that do not even amuse her; she would easily make the most hideous thing beautiful if she put it on once, and the most flagrant vice the fashion if she adopted it for a week; she has given the highest culture possible to her body and to her brain, only to spend her years in an ennui and an irritation beside which the life of the South Sea islanders would seem utility and wisdom; she has the clearest vision, the finest intelligence, the shrewdest wit, only to set her ambition on having a whole audience of a theatre forget the stage because she has entered her box, or the entire journals of a city chronicle the suicide of some madman who has taken his life because she crossed out his name on her tablets before a cotillon——’
He paused abruptly, becoming suddenly conscious that he was speaking in no general terms, and had only before his thoughts the vision of one woman.
‘No, my dear,’ he said kindly, passing his hand over the shining tresses of Yseulte; ‘I am not afraid that you will become a coquette or a lover of folly; you will not learn the slang of the hour, or yellow your white skin with maquillage; you will always be the young patrician of the time of the Lady of Beaujeu. You shall go to Paris if you wish, and do just as you like there; you must not blame me if it do not suit you better than it suits those roses which your foster-mother sends up in moss from her garden.’
‘Poor child!’ he thought, with a pang of conscience. ‘She has a right to enjoy any amusement she can. She is young; the world will be a play-place to her; if she can make for herself friends, interests, pastimes, I should be the last to prevent her. Sooner or later she will find out that she is so little to me. She is content now because she takes kindness for love, and because, in her innocence, she cannot conceive how one’s senses may be roused while one’s heart may lie dumb and cold as a stone. But when she is older she will perceive all that, and then the more friends she has found, and the less she leans on me, the less unhappy she will be. I will give her everything that she can wish for; all women grow contented and absorbed in the world.’