The girl could not have found words to answer to save her life. Instinctively she made her grand eighteenth-century curtsy in acknowledgment. She was very pale; her heart seemed to sink within her as she realised all the charm of this her rival.
Mme. de Vannes murmured a few amiable words, and left them opposite to one another; the girl trembled despite herself, as those indolent lustrous eyes scanned her with merciless investigation and smiled at her embarrassment.
It was her first experience of that obligation, so constant in the world, to meet what is dreaded and disliked with suavity and compliment.
‘I am a great friend of your cousin, too,’ continued Nadine Napraxine, with all the amiable condescension of a woman of the world to a child. ‘We shall be sure to meet constantly in the years to come, which will leave you so young and make us so old! Where have you lived? In an old Breton convent? I wish I had lived in a Breton convent too! Come and sit by me and talk to me a little. Do you know that I am here to-night on purpose to see you. I had a tiresome dinner, all of Russian people, or I should have come here earlier.’
She drew the girl down beside her on a sofa with that pretty imperiousness of which women as well as men often felt the charm and the command. She was most kindly, most gentle, most flattering, yet Yseulte suffered under all her gracious compliments as under the most poignant irony. She answered in monosyllables and at random; she was ill at ease and confused, she looked down with the fascination of a bird gazing at a snake on the hand which held hers, such a slender hand in its tan-coloured glove and with its circles of porte-bonheurs above the wrist, and its heavy bracelets crowding one another almost to the elbow.
She would not have spoken more than Yes or No to save her life, and she said even these in the wrong places; but Nadine Napraxine did not make the mistake of thinking her stupid, as less intelligent women would have done.
She studied her curiously whilst she continued to speak those amiable and careless nothings which are the armoury of social life; toy weapons of which the young know neither the use nor the infinite value. She had all the kindly condescension, the good-humoured, amused indulgence, of a grown woman of the world for a schoolgirl; by dates she was only seven years older than Yseulte de Valogne, but in experience and knowledge she was fifty years her senior.
‘Elle est vraiment très bien,’ she said, as she turned away from the girl and took the arm of Friederich Othmar. ‘At present she is like a statue in the clay, like a sketch, like a magnolia flower folded up; but Othmar will change all that. You must be so glad; his marriage must have been such an anxiety to you. Suppose he had married a Mongol! What would you have done?’
‘It was not precisely of the Mongol that I was most afraid, Madame,’ replied the Baron. ‘ Do you think too that a marriage is a termination to anyone’s anxieties? Surely, the dangerous romance begins afterwards in life as in novels.’
‘It would be very dull reading in either if it did not,’ said Madame Napraxine. ‘But we will hope that Mademoiselle and your nephew will read theirs together, and eschew the dangers; that is possible sometimes; and she will have one great advantage for the next five years; she will be handsomer every year.’