‘What I meant to say was,’ suggested Melville, ‘that, in that tiny tale, Tourguenieff, like a poet, as he was, at heart, describes precisely what sympathy will do to open the intelligence to the closed lives of others, whether bird or man. Perhaps, madame, sympathy would even do something to smooth the creases out of your rose-leaf—if you tried it.’
‘I suppose I am not sympathetic,’ said Nadine Napraxine, stripping the petals of the odontoglossum; ‘they all say so. But I think it is their own fault; they are so uninteresting.’
‘The quail,’ said Melville, ‘to almost everybody is only a little juicy morsel to be wrapped in a vine-leaf and roasted; but Tourguenieff had the vision to see in it the courage of devotion, the heroism of maternity, the loveliness of its life, the infinite pathos of its death. Yet, the exceptional estimate of the student’s view of it was quite as true as the general view of the epicure.’
‘Am I an epicure?’ said Nadine Napraxine, amused.
‘Spiritually, intellectually, you are,’ replied Melville; ‘and so nothing escapes the fastidiousness of your taste; yet perhaps, madame, something may escape the incompleteness of your sympathies.’
‘That is very possible; but, as I observed to Lady Brancepeth when she made me a similar reproach, one is as one is made. One is Tourguenieff or one is Brillat-Savarin, all that is arranged beforehand for one—somewhere.’
Melville had learned the ways of the world too well not to know how to glide easily, with closed eyes and averted ears, over such irreverences; but he ventured to say:
‘One cannot dispute the fact of natural idiosyncrasy and inclination, of course; but may not one’s self-culture be as much of the character as of the mind? Might it not become as interesting to strive and expand one’s moral as one’s intellectual horizon? It seems so to me, at the least.’
She laughed, and rang a little silver bell for Mahmoud to bring them some fresh tea.