‘It is great emotions which make happy illusions, and I believe you have never permitted those to approach you?’
‘I have viewed them from afar off, as Lucretius says one ought to see a storm.’
‘I do not doubt you have seen them very often, Princess,’ said Melville, with significance. ‘But as you have not shared them, they have passed by you like great waves which leave no mark upon the smoothness of the sand on which they break.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, while her mind reverted to the scene of which her boudoir had been the theatre three days before; then she added a little abruptly: ‘You know Mlle. de Valogne well—you are interested in her? What do you think of her marriage?’
‘I have known her from the time she was four years old,’ replied Melville. ‘I have seen her at intervals at the convent of Faïel. I am convinced she has no common character; she is very unlike the young girls one sees in the world, who have had their course of Deauville, Aix, and Biarritz. She is of the antique French patrician type; perhaps the highest human type that the world has ever seen, and the most capable of self-restraint, of heroism, of true distinction, and of loyalty. I fancy Elizabeth de France must have been just such a girl as is Yseulte de Valogne.’
‘What eulogy!’ returned his companion, with a little incredulous accent. ‘I have always wondered that your Church did not canonize the Princess Elizabeth. But you do not tell me what you think of the marriage.’
Melville smiled.
‘I might venture to prophecy if the success of a marriage depended on two persons, but it depends on so many others.’
‘You are very mysterious; I do not see what others have to do with it.’