Napraxine coloured dully with a dual sense of embarrassment and ridicule.
He was silent.
‘Are you sure?’ said his wife, with her head leaning back on her cushions and her demure smile gleaming beneath the lashes of her half-closed eyelids.
‘Nadine!’ stammered Napraxine, in mingled discomfiture and eagerness, which made him blunder more and more. ‘What can one do when you—you,—as God is above us, if you had not turned me adrift years ago as if I were a monster, I would never have looked at another woman. You do not believe it, but I would not. Even now, I would leave them all if you said a word,—if—if——’
She rose and laid the case of pearls down on a table near her.
‘My dear Prince,’ she said in her iciest tones, though, in her own heart, she could very willingly have laughed aloud, ‘I see you have indeed mistaken your road to the Avenue de Villiers. Do you think you can purchase my—kindness—as you do that of your mistresses? Pray let this be the last of such blunders. You have not been guilty of them for many years. Do not begin now. They offend me. You will only ruffle, very disagreeably and uselessly, the amiable understanding on which we have agreed to live.’
‘When did I ever agree?’
His face was darkly flushed, his voice was husky and had a tremor in it, something savage and imperious began to wake in him and tell him that after all this delicate and disdainful woman was his;—but her languid lids opened wholly, and her calm, luminous eyes looked him full in the face with that look with which the keeper can daunt, by sheer power of will, the animal which could trample him into dust and tear him into atoms.
‘Pray, do not let us re-open a discussion which has been closed for six years,’ she said in her softest, coldest voice. ‘I am quite sure you meant well; I never bear malice; I will wear your pearls to-night. We have a dinner, I think; for d’Aumale, is it not? Bonne fête, mon ami. Think what a troubled life you would have if I cared about that new house, and be grateful. Please send Paul here. He must take away some of this lilac. So much of it will give me migraine.’
Napraxine stifled as best he could some oath which he dared not utter aloud, and went slowly and sullenly out of her presence, sensible of an ignominious dismissal. His glance as he went dwelt with suspicion on the baskets and bouquets which made the room and the adjoining rooms gardens of orchids and odontoglossum, of gardenias and of tea-roses.