'A Spanish Mexican.'
Vàsàrhely was silent.
His cousin left him and went amongst her guests. A vague sense of uneasiness went with her at her consciousness of his hostility to Sabran. She wished she had not asked him to remain.
'You have never offended Egon?' she asked Sabran anxiously that night. 'You have always been forbearing and patient with him?'
'I have obeyed you in that as all things, my angel,', he answered her lightly. 'What would you? He is in love with you still, and I have married you! It is even a crime in his eyes that my children resemble me! One can never argue with a passion that is unhappy. It is a kind of frenzy.'
She heard with some impatience.
'He has no right to cherish such a resentment. He keeps it alive by brooding on it. I had hoped that when he saw you here, saw how happy you render me, saw your children too, he would grow calmer, wiser, more reconciled to the inevitable.'
'You did not know men, my love,' said Sabran, with a smile.
To him the unhappiness and the ill-will of Egon Vàsàrhely were matters of supreme indifference; in a manner they gratified him, they even supplied that stimulant of rivalry which a man's passion needs to keep at its height in the calm of safe possession. That Egon Vàsàrhely saw his perfect happiness lent it pungency and a keener sense of victory. When he kissed his wife's hand in the sight of her cousin, the sense of the pain it dealt to the spectator gave the trivial action to him all the sweetness and the ardour of the first caresses of his accepted passion.
Of that she knew nothing. It would have seemed to her ignoble, as so much that makes up men's desire always does seem to a woman of her temperament, even whilst it dominates and solicits her, and forces her to share something of its own intoxication.