Yseulte sighed wistfully. She vaguely felt that it was not within her means to reconcile him with the world and fate; she had not the magic wand.
‘I am always in dread,’ continued the Baron, ‘that you, with your religious ideas, and he, with his impatience of his position, will do something extraordinary and Quixotic; will turn S. Pharamond into a maison de santé, or this hotel into a lazar-house for cancer. I shall never be surprised at any madness of that sort.’
Yseulte sighed a little.
‘But, there is the misery of the world all around us,’ she ventured to say; ‘if we could alleviate it, would it not be worth any sacrifice?’
‘My dear,’ said Baron Fritz, ‘when Napoléon gave the opium at Jaffa, he did more to alleviate suffering than all the philanthropists have ever done. Yet it has been always brought against him as his worst action. I went once, out of curiosity, to see the Incurables at the hospital of la Salpêtrière. Well, if false sentiment did not prevent the treatment à la Jaffa taking place there, an infinitude of hideous suffering and of hideous deformity would be mercifully nded. But the world is so sentimental that it will send several hundred thousand of young and healthy men to endure all kinds of tortures in war for a question of frontier, or a matter of national etiquette, but it esteems it unlawful to kill idiots or drug to death incurables cursed with elephantiasis or leprosy.’
Yseulte’s clear eyes grew troubled; these views of life were perplexing to her. At Faïel all such contradictions had been simply accepted as ordained under one unquestioned and divine law; the conversation of Friederich Othmar depressed and bewildered her, but she could perceive its reason. It made her reflect; it made her more of a woman, less of a child. He thought that was for the best. If she were not educated in some worldly knowledge, the world would make an easy prey of her.
‘Otho treats her as if she were an ivory madonnina who would remain aloof on an altar all her days,’ he said to a woman he knew. ‘On the contrary, she is a beautiful creature, about whom all the world will buzz and sting like bees about a lily. She must be taught not to throw away her honey. She is just now in the clouds; she is very much in love with a man who is not in love with her; she is full of ideals and impossible sentiments. She is half a child, half an angel; but to hold her own in the world she must be something else—not so angelic and not so childish,—and she must learn to esteem people at their value, which is for the most part very small. It would be even well if she could see Otho as he is; she would take life more easily. She would not be so likely to fall headlong from a heaven of adoration into a stone well of disillusion. Truths live at the bottom of these wells, no doubt, but they are not agreeable, and they give a shock to sensitive people. A woman is prettier when she is sensitive. It is like piety or charity—it is an essentially feminine ornament, but it is not a quality which wears well.’
His friend laughed.