‘If I remember,’ said the Baron, ‘Marivaux was more merciful to humanity than is Madame Napraxine; he admitted that even with such homely materials as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, one could obtain infinite variety in expression; no two physiognomies are alike.’
‘Perhaps in Marivaux’s time men did not imitate the chic anglais!’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘I see very little variety myself. Everybody is terribly like everyone else, except the Comtesse Othmar,’ she added, with her charming smile, ‘who is only like Hope nursing Love, or some other picture of a fairer day than ours.’
Yseulte, pained at herself for her want of self-command, coloured hotly under the compliment, in which her alarmed sensitiveness fancied there was hidden a sarcasm. She did not know of what picture Nadine Napraxine spoke, and she thought—‘Does she mean that Hope was barren and foolish, that Love did not care?’ She remembered the silver amorino and the empty gourd.
Directly appealed to, a moment later, she murmured something at random; she did not well know what; she grew first pale, then red; she seemed constrained and stupid, void of ideas, and stiff in manner. Friederich Othmar could have broken his cane about her shoulders in his vexation.
‘Heavens and earth!’ he thought, ‘if you let yourself be magnetised at the first sight of an imagined rival, what will you do before the reality when you meet it? My poor little girl! It is not the women who adore a man, and are struck dumb because they see another woman whom he has once loved, who obtain any influence over him, or possess any charm whatever for him. Who is to tell you that? who is to open your eyes and harden your heart? who is to make you understand that you are as lovely as the morning, but that if you do not acquire self-control, wit, indifference, all the armoury of the world’s weapons, she will pass over you as artillery sweeps over the daisy in the grass.’
But he could not say his impatient thoughts aloud; he could not even, by his own readiness of language and easy persiflage, contrive wholly to hide the uneasiness and restraint which the presence of her guest brought upon Yseulte, and which she herself was at once too young and too frank to dissemble. They amused the Princess Napraxine, and they gratified her infinitely. She had not the slightest pity for them; she had never suffered from any such awkwardness herself.
‘You are cruel, Princess,’ Melville ventured to murmur as he rose and bade her adieu.
‘Have you only now discovered that?’ said Nadine. ‘And I do not know why you should discover it especially now, or why, even if it were truth, you should be in any way astonished. Thirty years of the confessional should have taught you that women are always cruel. Are you never cruel?’ she said aloud, turning to Yseulte. ‘Ah, then, your dog will disobey you and your horse run away with you, my dear Countess!’
‘Is there no power in affection?’ said Yseulte bravely, feeling her colour come and go, and conscious that she had made an absurd reply.
Madame Napraxine smiled with a little look of indulgent amusement, which made the girl thrill to the tips of her fingers.