‘My dear Platon, what nonsense!’ she said, with some real annoyance, and she murmured to herself: ‘In half an hour he will take something similar to half a dozen cocottes!’
But she could do no less than open the case, which was filled by a necklace, earrings, and a small crown for the hair in pink pearls.
Platon Napraxine watched her wistfully as she looked at them with a listless indifference. If he could only please her once! If he could only once see that beautiful contemptuous mouth smile kindly on him.
‘There is not one of them worth her little finger,’ he thought, meaning the companions and consolers of his life.
‘I think you have no pink pearls; it is the only thing you have not,’ he said; as humble still as a chidden dog. ‘Will you not let me wish you bonne fête, Nadine? I——’
He took her hand and carried it to his lips. She drew it away, not angrily, but with a profound indifference.
‘I cannot see why one day in the year is any more than another, that we should make speeches upon it,’ she said, shutting up the jewel case. ‘The pearls are quite charming. It is too good of you. Only, you know I do not in the least see why you should give me things; I really do not want them——’
It was the ‘j’en ai tant’ of her five-year-old philosophy.
‘I know you do not want them,’ said her husband with a blank sense of foolish disappointment, foolish because his hope had been foolish. ‘But still most women never have jewels enough. I do not mean that I ever thought you would care for them, but still it is the custom—and—one never likes the day to go by,—if you would say a kind word——’
‘My dear Platon,’ she said wearily, yet with a certain amusement at his stupidity, ‘why will you persist in that superstition that one day is any more than all the others?—and not even a Russian day either! You, who are such a Slavophil, should have ignored a French New Year’s day as quite pagan and indecent. The pearls are very pretty; I will put them on to-night, if that will please you. Only—only—you know I am not very fond of that sort of presents. Are you sure you have not another similar case in your pocket that you are going to take this morning to that very handsome new house in the Avenue Villiers? All the houses are new there, but that is newest——’