She had accepted his homage as she accepted the bouquets which men sent her, to die in masses in her ante-chambers.
His pain was intolerable, his disappointment was altogether out of proportion to the frail, vague hopes which he had cherished; but he felt also that his position was absurd, untenable; he had never been her lover, he had none of the rights of a lover; he was only one of many who had failed to please her, who had unconsciously blundered, who had committed the one unpardonable sin of wearying her.
Resistance could only make him ridiculous in her eyes. She had plainly intimated that she was tired of his acquaintance and companionship. It was an intense suffering to him, but it was not one which he could show to the world, or in which he could seek the world’s sympathy. If he had failed to please her—failed, despite all his opportunities, to obtain any hold upon her sympathies—it was such a failure as is only grotesque in the esteem of men, and contemptible in the sight of women.
‘A qui la faute?’ she would have said herself, with a pitiless amusement, which the world would only have echoed.
It was late in February, but already spring in the Riviera; a brilliant sun was dancing on all the million and one pretty things in her boudoir, for she liked light, and could afford, with her exquisite complexion and her flower-like mouth, to laugh at the many less fortunate of her sex, who dared not be seen without all the devices of red glass and rose-coloured transparencies and muffled sunbeams. She caressed her little dog, and bade the negro boy bring her some tea, and stretched herself out on a long low chair with a pleasant sense of freedom from a disagreeable duty done and over.
‘I will never be intimate with an Englishman again,’ she thought. ‘They cannot understand; they think they must be either your Cæsar or nullus: it is so stupid; and then, when you are tired, they grumble. Other men say nothing to you, but they fight somebody else,—which is so much better. It is only the Englishman who grumbles, and abuses you as if you were the weather!’
The idea amused her.
Through her open windows she could see the sea. She saw the boat of Geraldine, with its red-capped crew pulling straightway to the westward; he was going to his yacht; the affair was over peaceably; he would not kill himself like Seliedoff. Her husband would miss him for a little time, but he was used to men who made themselves his ardent and assiduous friends for a few months or more, and then were no more seen about his house, being banished by her; he was wont to call such victims the Zephyrs after that squadron of the mutinous in the Algerian army, which receives all those condemned and rejected by their chiefs. He would ask no questions; he would understand that his old companion had joined the rest; he had never cared for the fate of any save for that of young Seliedoff. There were always men by the score ready to amuse, distract, and feast with Prince Napraxine.
She drank her yellow tea with its slice of lemon, and enjoyed the unwonted repose of half an hour’s solitude. She was conscious at once of a certain relief in the definite exile of her late companion, yet of a certain magnanimity, inasmuch as she would enable other women to presume that he had grown tired of his allegiance.