“Jealous! That serene impassive man?”
“The serenity is acquired, and the impassiveness is an armor. He is a person of strong passions and deep affections. He adored his wife, and I have always supposed that his susceptibilities were played upon by some Iago.”
“But what Iago? And why?”
“Her father, perhaps, and out of spite. But I really know nothing,” said the Archduke, recollecting himself, the good wines of Les Mouettes having loosened his tongue to unusual loquacity.
“He didn’t give me anything to-day!” said Boo woefully from the front seat; she was unrewarded for her painful goodness, for her sweetly-imitated shyness, for the self-denial with which she had held her tongue, and bored herself to play ball noiselessly with that stout, bald, florid aide-de-camp.
The Archduke laughed.
“Giving is a delightful privilege,” he said; “but when we know that all the world is expecting us to give, the pastime palls. Adrian Vanderlin has felt that from the time he was in his nursery. You must allow me to remedy his omission in this instance, my charming little friend.”
Mouse went home sorely out of temper; it seemed to her quite monstrous that two persons, like this man and Billy’s daughter, should each have had command given them of a vast fortune by which they were each only bored, whilst she who would have spent such a fortune so well, and with so much enjoyment, was left a victim to the most sordid anxieties. There was certainly something wrong in the construction of the universe. She felt almost disposed to be a socialist.
As she went up the staircase of her hotel she was roused from her meditations by Boo’s voice, which was saying plaintively again, “He didn’t give me anything to-day!”
“I am very glad he did not,” said her mother. “You are a greedy, shameless, gobbling little cat.”