'Call me at least cousinette,' said Mdme. Olga; 'we are cousins, you know, thanks to Wanda. Oh! she will be very unhappy in St. Petersburg; she will not amuse herself, she never does. She is incapable of a flirtation; she never touches a card. When she dances it is only because she must, and then it is only a quadrille or a contre-dance. She always reminds me of Marie Thérèse's "In our position nothing is a trifle." You remember the Empress's letters to Versailles?'
Sabran was very much angered, but he was afraid to express his anger lest it should seem to make him absurd.
'Madame,' he said, with ill-repressed irritation, 'I know you speak only in jest, but I must take the liberty to tell you——however bourgeois it appear——that I do not allow a jest even from you upon my wife. Anything she does is perfect in my sight, and if she be imbued with the old traditions of gentle blood, too many ladies desert them in these days for me not to be grateful to her for her loyalty.'
She listened, with her bright black eyes fixed on him; then she leaned a little more closely on his arm.
'Do you know that you said that very well? Most men are ridiculous when they are in love with their wives, but it becomes you, Wanda is perfect, we all know that; you are not alone in thinking so. Ask Egon!'
The face of Sabran changed as he heard that name. As she saw the change she thought: 'Can it be possible that he is jealous?'
Aloud she said with a little laugh: 'I almost wonder Egon did not run you through the heart before you married. Now, of course, he is reconciled to the inevitable; or, if not reconciled, he has to submit to it as we all have to do. He grows very farouche; he lives between his troopers and his castle of Taróc, like a barbaric lord of the Middle Ages. Were you ever at Taróc? It is worth seeing——a huge fortress, old as the days of Ottokar, in the very heart of the Karpathians. He leads a wild, fierce life enough there. If he keep the memory of Wanda with him it is as some men keep an idolatry for what is dead.'
Sabran listened with a sombre irritation. 'Suppose we leave my wife's name in peace,' he said coldly. 'The grosser cotillon is about to begin; may I aspire to the honour?'
As he led her out, and the light fell on her red gold curls, on her dazzling butterflies, her armour of diamonds, her snow-white skin, a thousand memories of Cochonette came over him, though the scene around him was the ball-room of the Hofburg, and the woman whose great bouquet of rêve d'or roses touched his hand was a great lady who had been the wife of Gela von Szalras, and the daughter of the Prince Serriatine. He distrusted her, he despised her, he disliked her so strongly that he was almost ashamed of his own antagonism; and yet her contact, her grace of movement, the mere scent of the bouquet of roses had a sort of painful and unwilling intoxication for the moment for him.
He was glad when the long and gorgeous figures of the cotillon had tired out even her steel-like nerves, and he was free to leave the palace and go home to sleep. He looked at a miniature of his wife as he undressed; the face of it, with its tenderness and its nobility, seemed to him, after the face of this other woman, like the pure high air of the Iselthal after the heated and unhealthy atmosphere of a gambling-room.