‘That would be too infinitely ridiculous; though it is certainly a great pity, he was no relation of ours, only a bonne connaissance!’
‘A bonne connaissance!’ exclaimed Napraxine when he read the pencilled words. That was all the requiem given to the drowned man, whose battered and disfigured body was then on its way homeward, on the deck of a vessel which was ploughing a stormy way through dusky mountainous Atlantic waves!
She sat still a little while, looking through the remaining telegrams and casting them aside; all the rest were the mere congratulations of the season.
‘I wonder when people will invent anything new!’ she thought as she threw the last aside. ‘To think that the Romans five and twenty centuries ago were also running about and visiting and sending cakes and taking flowers, because what they called a new year had come! I suppose the world will never liberate itself from the camisole de force of idiotic customs.’
She wrote a telegram of sympathy to the sister of Geraldine as she had written a letter of condolence to the mother of Seliedoff; then she had herself wrapped in sealskin from head to foot and prepared for her drive in the Bois.
‘When I am gone, open the windows, Paul,’ she said to the servant, who was so astonished that he ventured to ask if he heard aright, knowing that his lady loved warm air as a palm does.
‘Open the windows and leave them open,’ she repeated. She looked at all the hot-house blossoms and thought, with that cruelty which was latent in her side by side with her higher qualities, ‘They will all be withered in an hour. Paul will tell all the valets, they will tell all their masters——’
The fancy diverted her. She liked flowers, but she liked a little cruelty like this much better. It would be wholesome for all those men to know how she valued their New Year’s gifts.
‘Women nowadays make them so vain,’ she said to herself. ‘If it were not for me, they would never get a lesson at all.’
To some the lesson had been severe, severe as the severity of death; but that fact scarcely affected her conscience.