But the latter consideration weighed little with her; she had been too satiated with triumph not to be indifferent to it, and she was at all times careless of the opinions of others. She would miss him a little, as one misses a well-trained servant, but there would be so many others ready to fill his place. Whenever her groom-of-the-chambers told her hall-porter to say ‘Madame reçoit,’ her rooms were filled with young men ready to obey her slightest sign or wildest whim as poodles or spaniels those of their masters. There were not a few who, like Geraldine, regulated their seasons and their sojourns by the capricious movements of the Princess Napraxine, as poor benighted shepherds follow the gyrations of an ignis-fatuus. Whether north, south, east, or west, wherever she was momentarily resident, there was always seen her corps de garde.
As she sat alone now for the brief half-hour before her usual drive, her past drifted before her recollection in clear colours, as though she were quite old. She remembered her childhood, spent at the embassies of great cities, where her father was the idol of all that was distinguished and of much that was dissolute; the most courtly, the most witty, the most elegant, of great diplomatists. She remembered how, sitting in her mother’s barouche in the Bois or the Prater, or petted and caressed by sovereigns and statesmen in her mother’s drawing-rooms, she had seen so much with her opal-like eyes, heard so much with her sea-shell-like ears, and had, at ten years old, said to Count Platoff, ‘Je serai honnête femme; ce sera plus chic;’ and how his peal of laughter had disconcerted her own serious mood and solemnity of resolve. Then she remembered how, when she was seventeen years old, her mother had advised her to marry her cousin; and how her father, when she had been tempted to ask his support of her own adverse wishes, had twisted his silken white moustaches with a little shrug of his shoulders, and had said: ‘Mais, mon enfant, je ne sais—nous sommes presque ruinés; ça me plaira—et un mari, c’est si peu de chose!’
‘Si peu de chose!’ she thought, now; and yet a bullet that you drag after you, a note of discord always in your music, a stone in your ball slipper, dance you ever so lightly—an inevitable ennui always awaiting you!
‘If they had not been in such haste, I should have met Othmar and have married him!’ she mused, with that frankness which was never missing from her self-communion. ‘Life would have looked differently;——I would have made him the foremost man in Europe; he has the powers needful, but he has no ambitions; his millions have stifled them.’
She thought, with something that was almost envy, of the fate of Yseulte, and with a remembrance, which was almost disgust, of the early hours of her own marriage, when all the delicacy and purity of her own girlhood had revolted against the brutality of obligations which she had in her ignorance submitted to accept.
How could she care for the children born of that intolerable degradation to which no habit or time had had power to reconcile her?
In her own eyes she had been as much violated as any slave bought in the market.
‘If I had daughters, they should at least know to what they surrendered themselves before they were given away in marriage,’ she had often reflected, with a bitter remembrance of the absolute innocence in which she herself had repeated the vows, and broken the glass, which had indissolubly united her to her cousin Platon.
Then, with the irony even of herself, and the doubt even of herself, which were stronger than any other instincts in her, she laughed at her own momentary sentiment.