‘So, Othmar, like every one else, you find that marriage leads to the world, not to the hidden doves’ nest of the poets?’ said Nadine Napraxine after dinner, when her rooms had filled an hour before midnight, and her imperial guest had gone and left her free.
‘I am afraid it is impossible to avoid following the mould of the society we live in,’ replied Othmar. ‘The hope of being original is one of the many illusions which we leave behind us with time.’
‘I confess that I am a little disappointed in you,’ she continued, with the smile of malice which he knew so well. ‘I should have thought you would have had courage to live your own life, to avoid beaten paths, and to keep your lovely arum lily from the Breton woods out of our forcing-house. Allow me to say it in all simplicity and sincerity, she is most lovely. All Paris envies you.’
Othmar’s face flushed as he bowed in acknowledgment. He did not reply. Though the habits of the world had taught him many such lessons, he found it hard to appear unmoved beside the woman he loved, and discuss with her that other whom he had wedded. She understood quite well the unwillingness and the embarrassment which he felt, and they made her but the more tenacious in pursuit of the subject she had selected.
‘Heavens!’ she thought, ‘what children of Nature men always remain! They are unmanned if they meet a woman who recalls a love scene ten years old, whilst a woman would not move an eyelash if she encountered a score of lovers she had forsaken—no!—not if she had hired bravoes to kill them, and they knew it!’
Aloud she said, in her sweetest voice: ‘I remember you were always so haunted with ideals. You must certainly have realised the most spiritual and the purest of them now. When I heard people say that you were going to shut yourself up in your country house in the Orléannais, it seemed to me perfectly natural, perfectly fitting; you never cared for society. Why should you contaminate your young wife with it? I thought you were going to show us that an idyllic life was still possible. We are all sad sceptics, but we should have believed you. Why did you lose so good an opportunity? To live in Paris, to receive and be received; any one can do that; toute la gomme does it; Amyôt ought to have given you something better.’
‘To live in the country needs a clear conscience,’ replied Othmar impatiently, not very well knowing what he said.
‘I hope you have murdered nobody,’ said his tormentor. ‘Really, without compliment, I should have thought you were one of the few men who could have lived in the country without ennui. You love books, you like your own company, and you are not enamoured of that of others. Besides, it is really a pity to bring that young angel,—that clear-eyed saint,—into our feverish world. She will only lose that lovely complexion, and perhaps her health as well, learn a great deal of folly, and feel thirty years old before she is twenty. Why do you do it? It is heartless of you. Amyôt is her world.’
He did not attempt to reply.
She had spoken with sincerity, though her motive in speaking was not so sincere as her sentiment. Nadine Napraxine, who herself often regretted the premature womanhood which the manner of her childhood had brought so early to her, who often sighed restlessly, if disdainfully, for that innocence of mind, that freshness of heart which she had never enjoyed—the blue cornflower of Louise of Prussia, the green fields of Eugénie de Guerin,—felt at that moment the impulse of compassion which she expressed. It seemed to her, momentarily at least, cruel to have brought any creature so youthful and so easily contented by simple things, as Yseulte was, into the furnace of the world, where all simple tastes and fancies perish like a handful of meadow daisies cast into a brazier.