Yseulte remembered that S. Francis had proved that even wolves may be tamed into affection and usefulness; but though she believed firmly in that legend, she hesitated to put it forward, even as an allegory, as evidence against the arguments of the Baron. She did not lack courage, nor even that truest courage, the courage of opinion, but she had been reared in the old traditions of high breeding, which make contradiction a vulgarity, and, from the young to the old, an offence.
‘I hope you will not make yourself into a sort of Judith Montefiore,’ continued the Baron irritably. ‘We are not Jews. Jews must do that kind of thing to get themselves tolerated. We could forgive them the Crucifixion, but we cannot forgive them their percentage. Though we are not Jews, Otho has already done some Quixotic things in the Montefiore fashion. I hope you will not encourage him to continue them.’
‘Tell me what they were,’ she said, with the light in her eyes and the colour in her face.
‘Not I,’ said the Baron; ‘I much prefer to see him smoking à Londrès at the Jockey.’
‘Had he ever any very great sorrow?’ she ventured to ask.
‘None, my dear, but what he chose to make for himself,’ replied Friederich Othmar, with contempt. ‘Do you remember Joubert’s regret that he could not write his thoughts on the bark of trees by merely looking at them?—well, Otho’s griefs are much as baseless. As if,’ he added, ‘as if there were any real grief in the world,—except the gout!’
‘He is like Obermann, like Amiel,’ she said timidly. She had read passages in the volumes of those dreamy and isolated thinkers in the library of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar shrugged his shoulders; those names signified to him the very lowest deeps of human ineptitude and folly.
‘Men who were so afraid of disappointment and disillusion that they would allow themselves to enjoy nothing! It would be as reasonable to let oneself die of starvation as a preventive of dyspepsia! Such men do not think; they only moon. The cattle that lie and graze under the trees have meditations quite as useful. My child,’ he added, ‘would you be wise or foolish if you threw all your diamonds into the river in anger because they were not stars? That is what your husband does with his life. You must learn to persuade him that the stars are unattainable, and that the diamonds represent a very fair and fruitful kingdom if not the powers of the air.’