The less innocent malice of the Countess Brancka's eyes fell for a passing moment with inquiry and curiosity on the face of her hostess, which, however, told her nothing.
'Then he was Parsifal or Perceforest!' she cried, 'and he has ridden away to find the emerald cup of tradition. What a pity that he paused on his way to break the bank at Monte Carlo. The two do not accord. I fear he is but Lancelot.'
'There is no reason why he should not pursue an honourable ambition,' said the Princess, with some offence.
'No reason at all, even if it be not an honourable one,' said Madame Brancka, with a curious intonation. 'He always wins at baccara; he has done some inimitable caricatures which hang at the Mirliton; he is an amateur Rubenstein, and he has been the lover of Cochonette. These are his qualifications for the Chamber, and if they be not as valiant ones as those of les Preux they are at least more amusing.'
'My dear Olga,' said the Princess, with a certain dignity of reproof, 'you are not on your straw chair at Trouville. There are subjects, expressions, suggestions, which are not agreeable to my ears or on your lips.'
'Cochonette!' murmured the offender, with a graceful little curtsey of obedience and contrition. 'Oh, Madame, if you knew! A year ago we talked of nothing else!'
The Countess Brancka wished to talk still of nothing else, and though she encountered a chillness and silence that would have daunted a less bold spirit, she contrived to excite in the Princess a worldly and almost unholy curiosity concerning that heroine of profane history who had begun life in a little bakehouse of the Batignolles, and had achieved the success of putting her name (or her nickname) upon the lips of all Paris.
Throughout dinner she spoke of little save of Cochonette, that goddess of bouffe, and of Parsifal, as she persisted in baptising the one lover to whom alone the goddess had ever been faithful. With ill-concealed impatience her hostess bore awhile with the subject; then dismissed it somewhat peremptorily.
'We are provincials, my dear Olga,' she said, with a very cold inflection of contempt in her voice. 'We are very antiquated in our ways and our views. Bear with our prejudices and do not scare our decorum. We keep it by us as we keep kingfishers' skins amongst our furs in summer against moth; a mere superstition, I daresay, but we are only rustic people.'
'How you say that, Wanda,' said her guest, with a droll little laugh, 'and you look like Marie Antoinette all the while! Why will you bury yourself? You would only need to be seen in Paris a week, and all the world would turn after you and go back to tradition and ermine, instead of chien and plush. If you live another ten years as you live now you will turn Hohenszalras into a religious house; and even Mme. Ottilie would regret that. You will institute a Carmelite Order, because white becomes you so. Poor Egon, he would sooner have you laugh about Cochonette.'