‘And to have brought her near me!’ she thought, with the singular union of disdain and of compassion with which she had looked for the first time at the face of the child in the salons of Millo. Whilst he remained silent she looked at him a little curiously, a little contemptuously; with no pity whatever for him.
‘One day, when I was ten years old, I was in my father’s study,’ she continued with apparent irrelevance. ‘I was very tiresome; he was dictating to three secretaries alternately, and I tormented him with questions. He was so good to me that he could never bear to turn me out; but he threw me an illustrated copy of “Gil Blas.” I became as quiet as a mouse. I was entranced, delighted; I never spoke for two hours—but I do not know that I was the better for it afterwards. “Gil Blas” is not amongst the moral tales of children. I suppose he did not think of that; he only wanted to get rid of me.’
Othmar coloured with anger and self-consciousness. He knew very well that she meant to imply that he sent his wife into the world as Count Platoff had given his daughter ‘Gil Blas.’ Conscience would not allow him a disclaimer, even if a sense of ridicule in her reminiscences, apparently so ill-timed, had permitted him to make one.
‘I do not know that I was any the better,’ continued Nadine Napraxine in the same even, dreamy tones. ‘But I do not know that I was any the worse. Everything depends on temperament. Oh yes, much more than on circumstance, let them say what they will. Temperament is like climate, a thing unalterable. All the forces of men will not make the Nile desert cold, or the Baltic shores tropical. It is so delightful to think that something escapes the carpentering of man! Do you know, when an earthquake asserts itself or a mountain kills people, I can never help saying to myself with pleasure—“Ah-ha! there is something left, then, that they cannot explain away, or regulate, or measure with their pocket-rule, and what a comfort that is!”’
She laughed a little, leaning back in her chair, slowly moving a fan which Watteau had painted for Larghillière.
‘Madame Napraxine,’ answered Othmar bitterly, ‘has always occupied in life the position which Juvenal thought so enviable; she has always watched the tempest and the shipwreck from her own safe couch behind her casement.’
‘Yes, I have,’ she murmured, with a little sigh of self-satisfaction. ‘It is so easy not to go out in bad weather.’
‘May one not be overtaken by it?’
‘Not if one have a good aneroid.’