‘Sainte Mousseline!’ echoed the old man, with more temper than prudence. ‘Surely that epithet would not apply to Yseulte!’
‘Of course not now,’ said Nadine, serenely. ‘Sainte Mousseline has given way to the nuptial white satin. Only you spoke of Nature;—and if I were you I would not wish for Nature to prevail too much at Amyôt, for Nature has a sad trick of being soon satisfied, and dissatisfied, and disposed to change. You know it is only the poets who invented Constancy, at the same time that they created the Phœnix and the Hippogriff.’
‘If I thought he could be unfaithful to so much youth and so much innocence——,’ began the Baron, with some heat.
‘He will not be so yet, at all events,’ said Prince Ezarhédine. ‘Men are not quite so fickle as Madame Nadine thinks.’
‘Men are what women make them,’ she replied, with her most contemptuous tranquillity. ‘ As a rule, they are always faithless to women who love them. It is tiresome to be loved; “ça vous donne des nerfs.” You get out of temper and you go away; then silly people say you are inconstant.’
‘You will admit that at least it seems very like it,’ said Baron Fritz.
The great statesman, standing near, looked a little wistfully at her. He thought that he would not have found it tiresome to be loved by the wife of Napraxine.
‘The Countess Othmar will be too young to understand all that,’ continued Nadine. ‘ She will give too much of herself. She will not have the first essential: savoir se reprendre. Love is like all other fine arts—it should be treated scientifically. Do you remember Sergius Veriatine? He was devoted to the Princess Platoff—my cousin Sophie. All at once he broke with her. Some one asked him why he did so. He answered honestly: “Un jour, elle faisait la faute de me prier de rester quand je voulais m’en aller.” Serge Veriatine put the whole of male human nature into that sentence. Othmar’s wife will be always begging him to stay when he will want to go; she is so young. She is, of course, in love with him; very much in love with him; and she is so unhappily inexperienced that she will be sure to tell him so a hundred times a day. Now, however pretty a story is, still when you hear it very often it grows dull: you see she is beginning with an immense mistake: Amyôt in the winter!’