‘Can we not leave Chateaubriand alone?’
‘And speak only of yourself? It is a curious thing, but a man is never contented unless he is speaking solely of himself. It is the only entity in which he takes any real interest.’
‘Perhaps it is the only one with which he is really conversant.’
‘Oh, you must be conversant with your wife’s. Her mind must be as clear as crystal. Do you know, Othmar, I think you ought to be more grateful than you are; to have so very pure a creature as that to be the mother of your children, is a privilege to you and to your race.’
She spoke gravely for the moment, abandoning the ironical mockery of her habitual tone.
He rose abruptly.
‘I cannot be grateful,’ he said very low, with a passionate vibration in his voice. ‘I was a fool, and I committed a great error. With all my life burnt up by one love, I imagined that I could slake the flames of it by contact with youth and innocence, as if the woodland brook could cool and arrest the boiling lava!’
Nadine Napraxine heard, with her languid lids drooped over her eyes, and the shadow of a smile upon her mouth.
‘If it were so, you should be too proud to confess it,’ she said, after a pause. ‘To be sure it is not a very confidential confession, for everyone sees that your—experiment—has not been quite so successful as you hoped, as Baron Fritz, at least, hoped. Well, we have talked long enough in this solitude; you may take me to the ball-room.’
When he went home, no sleep came to him that night; his conscience and his pride rebuked him for the admission he had made, and before his eyes there passed ceaselessly the vision of Nadine Napraxine, pale, ethereal, magically seductive, like those figures of Herculaneum which float noiselessly in the air, their bodies delicate as the gossamer-winged body of the Deilephila.