‘She has very noble qualities,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps they are somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of her life; one I may tell you.’
And he related to her the episode of Boganof.
Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would for ever retain her power on him.
‘And she is so beautiful!’ she added, with a little sigh. Melville looked at her in surprise.
‘Who has been talking to her?’ he wondered as he said aloud:
‘There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror, my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination, some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled; ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic coups de tête; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living any other; the Réné of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a God.’
‘Except her tailor!’ said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.
‘Pardon me,’ said Melville, with a smile. ‘Madame Napraxine’s tailor is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters. The king of couturiers trembles before her, he is so afraid of her displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes la pluie et le beau temps in the world of fashion.’