The determination once made, she adhered to it. She had felt a vague annoyance at the constancy and the persistency with which regret for the lost society of Sabran recurred to her. She had attributed it to the solitude in which she lived: that solitude which is the begetter and the nurse of thought may also be the hotbed of unwise fancies. It was indeed a solitude filled with grave duties, careful labours, high desires and endeavours; but perhaps, she thought, the world for a while, even in its folly, might be healthier, might preserve her from the undue share which the memory of a stranger had in her musings.
Her people, her lands, her animals, would none of them suffer by a brief absence; and perhaps there were duties due as well to her position as to her order. She was the only representative of the great Counts of Szalras. With the whimsical ingratitude to fate common to human nature, she thought she would sooner have been obscure, unnoticed, free. Her rank began to drag on her with something like the sense of a chain. She felt that she was growing irritable, fanciful, thankless; so she ordered the huge old palace in the Herrengasse to be got ready, and sought the world as others sought the cloister.
In a week's time she was installed in Vienna, with a score of horses, two score of servants, and all the stir and pomp that attend a great establishment in the most aristocratic city of Europe, and she made her first appearance at a ball at the Residenz covered with jewels from head to foot; the wonderful old jewels that for many seasons had lain unseen in their iron coffers—opals given by Rurik, sapphires taken from Kara Mustafa, pearls worn by her people at the wedding of Mary of Burgundy, diamonds that had been old when Maria Theresa had been young.
She had three months of continual homage, of continual flattery, of what others called pleasure, and what none could have denied was splendour. Great nobles laid their heart and homage before her feet, and all the city looked after her for her beauty as she drove her horses round the Ringstrasse. It left her all very cold and unamused and indifferent.
She was impatient to be back at Hohenszalras, amidst the stillness of the woods, the sound of the waters.
'You cannot say now that I do not care for the world, because I have forgotten what it was like,' she observed to her aunt.
'I wish you cared more,' said the Princess. 'Position has its duties.'
'I never dispute that; only I do not see that being wearied by society constitutes one of them. I cannot understand why people are so afraid of solitude; the routine of the world is quite as monotonous.'
'If you only appreciated the homage that you receive——'
'Surely one's mind is something like one's conscience: if one can be not too utterly discontented with what it says one does not need the verdict of others.'