'His motive is to please you,' thought the Princess, but she was too wary to say so.
She merely replied:
'No motive is ever altogether unmixed, as you cruelly observed; but I should say that his must be on the whole sufficiently pure. He wishes to relieve the inaction and triviality of a useless life.'
'To embrace a hopeless cause is always in a manner noble,' assented her niece. 'And I grant you that he has spoken very well.'
Then she went to her own room to dress for dinner.
In the evening she read the reported speech again, with closer attention. It was eloquent, ironical, stately, closely reasoned, and rose in its peroration to a caustic and withering eloquence of retort and invective. It was the speech of a born orator, but it was also the speech of a strongly conservative partisan.
'How much of what he says does he believe?' she thought, with a doubt that saddened her and made her wonder why it came to her. And whether he believed or not, whether he were true or false in his political warfare, whether he were selfish or unselfish in his ambitions, what did it matter to her?
He had stayed there a few weeks, and he had played so well that the echoes of his music still seemed to linger after him, and that was all. It was not likely they would ever meet again.