At her command all honour, duty and allegiance would be mere empty words on his ear, without power to hold him, or meaning to move him. Dignity, self-respect, and loyalty to his self-chosen vows would become no more to him than threads of silk upon the neck of a courser broke loose. She had only to let him enter there, and the world would hold nothing for him but herself.
And for once she might perchance be able to share that oblivion, to comprehend that ecstasy; and yet she hesitated, because a new faint sense of pity and of compassion had come upon her.
‘After all,’ she thought, ‘I should probably care such a little while, and she, poor child,—it is all her life!’
A disdainful compassion forbade her to strike down so weak a foe. Opposition or conflict would have intensified all her imperious resolve, and heightened the zest of her power of destruction; but the helplessness, the feebleness of her rival disarmed her. It would be like striking a nesting-bird, a wounded kid.
Nadine Napraxine thought of her with a sensation of pity and the stronger sensation of disdain which was inevitable to her character. A creature who could not conquer, could not resist, could not keep hold upon her own, seemed a thing so foolish and so feeble to her! Even in her solitude, her imperial supremacy made her lips smile contemptuously, her eyes gleam with scorn, as she rose and paced her chamber for a few moments, her head erect and her bosom risen high with her proud thoughts.
All the superb courage and scorn which were much stronger in her than any other emotion, rejected so easy a victory, so sure a triumph.
‘She is so impotent, poor little fool!’ she murmured. ‘She will break her heart for ever in vain; she will never touch his.’
Her rooms were filled with the sweet faint smell of the roses, and heated to the heat of a midsummer noon. She sat still in the dreamy warmth, and all her vague regrets oppressed her with a faint, heavy sense of inclinations suppressed, and impulses awaking after long torpor.
‘I should not hesitate at a crime,’ she thought, ‘but this would be almost a baseness.’