‘If he be not contented——’ began the Duc, and paused, conscious that for him to say anything except a jest of any marriage under the sun would appear supremely ridiculous to his companions. Yet his admiration for Yseulte was not dormant, and took a still warmer character as he saw her in the grande tenue of a woman of the world, with the Othmar diamonds, long famous and long unseen, on her fair hair and her white breast.
‘She has too many jewels for such a child,’ he said irritably. ‘She is covered with them like an Indian idol. That is so like a financier’s love of display!’
‘I dare say he has given them to her as you give toys to a child,’ replied the diplomatist. ‘Othmar has no faults of display. What has been almost ridiculous in him has been a simplicity of taste not in accord with his millions. But his wife is so very handsome that she may well betray him into some vanities.’
Twelve months had truly made in her that almost magical transformation which passion can cause in a very young and innocent girl who, from entire seclusion and absolute ignorance, is suddenly thrown into the arms of a man whom she has scarcely seen, yet timidly adores. She had lost her extreme spirituality of expression, but she had gained a thousand-fold in other ways. Her form had developed, her whole person had become that of a woman instead of a child; she was many years older than she had been one short year before, when, in her little quiet chamber under the woods of Faïel, she had only thought of love as a mystical religious emotion, and of herself as the betrothed of Christ.
She filled her place, and did the honours of her house with a calm grace which had nothing of the hesitation or the awkwardness of youth. He had told her what to do, and she did it with perfect ease, and that dignity which had so become her when she had curtsied to Melville as a little child in the old, dusky house in the Ile Saint-Louis. In manner she might have been a Queen of France for five-and-twenty years. It was only in the unworn transparency of the fair skin, beneath which the blood came and went so warmly, the slenderness of the lines of her form, the childlike naïveté of her smile, that her exceeding youthfulness was still revealed.
She made no single error; she said little, but she said always what was needful and becoming; she received each one of her guests with the phrase that pleased them, with the observances that were due to them; there was no hesitation or awkwardness in her. Even women who watched her, as her cousin did, with a malicious wish to find her at fault somewhere, were forced to confess to themselves that she bore herself admirably. If she had a defect, it was that she appeared a little cold. She was always exquisitely courteous; she was never familiar.
‘She has the manner of the last century,’ said Madame de Vannes, ‘of the last century, before the women of Marie Antoinette rode donkeys and milked cows.’
To see that baby who six months ago had never spoken to any man except her confessor, and never worn any ornament except her convent medal, receiving sovereigns and princes and ambassadors, de puissance à puissance, and wearing diamonds which were ten times bigger, finer, and in greater profusion than her own, made her very angry, and yet made her laugh. She had seen many transformations of fillettes into great ladies, but none quite so rapid, so striking, or so complete as that of her young cousin into the mistress of the Hôtel Othmar.
‘I wish Nadine Napraxine were here this evening,’ she thought with that good-humoured malice which enjoys a friend’s annoyance without meaning any real unkindness.
‘All Paris will talk of your ball and much more of you to-morrow,’ said de Vannes during the evening to his wife’s cousin. ‘Does that please you as much as it pleases most of them?’