‘And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?’ murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt was the enemy of her life.
‘You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions, my dear,’ interrupted the Baron; ‘for you have one beside you every day in Otho’s. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband’s—and some other people’s—is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and as indefinite as any impressionniste’s picture.’
Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face was very grave.
‘M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,’ said Melville, gaily. ‘Your age has destroyed the femme croyante. Nature, which always avenges herself, gives you the femme du monde, which, in its lowest stages, becomes the cabotine, and in its highest just such an ethereal, capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person of the Princess Napraxine.’
‘Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The two species of womankind have existed since the days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old story (I think it is in Moore’s Diary) of the grazier’s son who went to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact—that bullocks were very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.’
Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville, and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to acknowledge.
As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and announced ‘Madame la Princesse Napraxine.’
Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and smiling indifference which makes the most impenetrable of all masks. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor answered the courtesy she mechanically made.
Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue, and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to himself, ‘What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have those situations gone through, and over. The poor child!—so happy as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame Napraxine is precisely the same kind of charmeresse that Propertius used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the same.’
Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying: