‘Who has told you of Madame Napraxine?’ he thought, as he answered her: ‘Yes! that is the name of the lady coming in now; she is a famous European beauty, though to my taste she is too slender and too pale.’
The girl did not reply; her eyes followed the trail of Princess Nadine’s pale primrose-coloured skirts laden with lace, and fastened here and there with large lilies and lilac. Before that inimitable grace, that exquisite languor and ease, that indescribable air of indifference and of empire and of disdain which made the peculiar power of Nadine Napraxine, the poor child felt her own insignificance, her own childishness, her own powerlessness; she fancied she must look rustic, awkward, stupid: she grew very pale, and her throat swelled with pain under her lover’s pearls.
‘It is too early for you to have that adder in your breast,’ thought Friederich Othmar, as he watched her. ‘What a coward he was to go away, instead of standing his ground beside you! After all, why is everyone so afraid of this Russian woman?’
Aloud, he only said: ‘The Princess is coming to you; courage, mon enfant. A woman of the world is certainly an alarming animal, but you will have to meet many such, and you will be one yourself before very long.’
‘Fillette, come and be presented to Mme. Napraxine; she wishes it,’ said her cousin at that moment in her ear. The girl shrank back a little, and the colour came into her face; she rose, nevertheless, obediently.
Nadine Napraxine came half-way to meet her, with an indulgent little smile, of which the compassion and disdain penetrated the inmost soul of Yseulte with a cruel sense of inferiority. Yet had she not been so humble and so embarrassed she might have seen a look of surprise in the eyes of her rival. Nadine saw at a glance that in this child there was no ‘Sainte Mousseline’ to be easily derided and contemned.
‘How beautiful a woman she will be in a year or two!’ she thought, with that candour which was never lacking in her in her judgments of her greatest foes. ‘He is going to possess all that, and he only sighs in his soul for me!—what fools men are!’
While she so thought, she was still smiling as she came to meet Yseulte with that slow, soft, indescribable grace of which she had the secret.
‘I am an old friend of Count Othmar’s; you must let me be yours in the future,’ she said with gracious kindliness. ‘Shall I offend you if I venture to say that I am sure he is a very happy and fortunate person? I dare say I shall please you better if I say that he deserves to be so.’