'In all the world there is not another Countess Wanda!'
'Ah! that is your only defect; you will always avoid argument by escaping through the side-door of compliment. It is true, to be sure, that your flattery is a very high and subtle art.'
'It is like all high art then, based on what is eternally true.'
'You will always have the last word, and it is always so graceful a one that it is impossible to quarrel with it. But, Réné, I want you to speak without compliment to me for once. Tell me, are you indeed never—never—a little weary of being here?'
He hesitated a moment and a slight flush came on his face.
She observed both signs, slight as they were, and sighed; it was the first sigh she had ever breathed since her marriage.
'Of course you are, of course you must be,' she said quickly. 'It has been selfish and blameable of me never to think of it before. It is paradise to me, but no doubt to you, used as you have been to the stir of the world, there, must be some tedium, some dulness in this mountain isolation. I ought to have remembered that before.'
'You need do nothing of the kind, now,' he said. 'Who has been talking to you? Who has brought this little snake into our Eden?'
'No one; and it is not a snake at all, but a natural reflection. Hohenszalras and you are the world to me, but I cannot expect that Hohenszalras and I can be quite as much to yourself. It is always the difference between the woman and the man. You have great talents; you are ambitious.'
'Were I as ambitious as Alexander, surely I have gained wherewithal to be content!'