The confession escaped him despite himself, and he regretted it passionately as soon as it was uttered.
‘That is why you are faithful,’ said Nadine Napraxine, smiling. ‘If you had been welcome, how poor and pale the whole country of your explorations would have seemed to you! There is only one way not to have shut on you those dreadful gates of disillusion; it is to be wise, and never to pass through them.’
‘Your philosophies are, no doubt, madame, as correct as your observations,’ said Othmar, with impatience.
‘I pass my life in observing,’ she replied. ‘It is the only pursuit in society which has really any interest in it. But tell me, do you not a little, just a little, neglect your wife? It is a pity, she is so young; in time, if you be not there, someone else will be.’
‘Never!’ he interrupted, with some heat. ‘I have many faults, no doubt, and I abandon them to your observation; but Yseulte has not a single defect that I have seen; she is loyalty, innocence, and honour incarnated.’
‘They are three charming qualities,’ replied Nadine Napraxine, ‘but they do not appear to have any result except that of making you dangerously confident that you may leave them wholly to themselves.’
Othmar coloured; he was sensible of the correctness of the accusation, and it irritated him excessively to hear the woman he loved rebuke him for his conduct to his wife.
‘If I be too indifferent where all my allegiance should be given,’ he said abruptly, ‘the Princess Napraxine should be the last on earth to accuse me of it. She knows the cause.’
‘The cause, I imagine, is in your temperament,’ she replied, ignoring his meaning, ‘as it was in Chateaubriand’s.’