'Le mari amoureux!' she murmured. 'Really I did not believe in the existence of that type. But it is quite admirable that it should exist. Its example is very much wanted in Paris.'
He felt himself colour like a youth, but it was with irritation; he was at a loss for an answer. To have defended his admiration of his wife at the sword's point would have been easy; to defend it from a woman's ridicule was more difficult. Wanda did not hear; she was listening to the song of Dinorah, and was dreamily regretting the solitude of Hohenszalras, and thinking of what pleasure it would be to return. All the news that Greswold and her stewards sent her thence was precious to her; no details seemed to her insignificant or without interest; and her own letters in return were full of minute attention to the welfare of everyone and of everything she had left there. She was roused from her home reverie by the voice of her sister-in-law, raised more highly and saying impatiently:
'Why should you object, Réné, when I say that I wish it?'
'What do you wish?' said Wanda, who always felt a singular annoyance whenever she heard him thus familiarly addressed. 'Whatever you may wish, I am sure M. de Sabran can require no second bidding to procure it for you, if it be within the limits of the possible.'
'I wish to see a Breton Pardon,' said Olga Brancka, with a gesture of her fan towards the stage. 'There is one next week in his own country; I want him to invite me—us—to Romaris.'
Wanda, who knew that he always shrank from the mention of Romaris, interposed to save him from persecution.
'There is nothing at Romaris to invite us to,' she said for him. 'Neither you nor I can live in a cabin or a fishing-boat; especially can we not in March weather.'
'You can live in a hut on your Alps,' returned the other, 'and I do not dislike tent life in the Karpathians. If he sent his major-domo down, he would soon make the sands and rocks blossom like the rose, and villages would arise as fast as they did before the great Katherine. Why not? It would be charming. Has he no feeling for the cradle of his ancestors? We must put him through a course of Lamartine.'
'An unfortunate allusion; he lived to lose Milly,' said Sabran, finding himself forced to say something. 'In midsummer, Mesdames, you might perhaps rough it, tant bien que mal; but now!—there is nothing to be seen except fog and surf at sea, and mud and pools inland. Even a Pardon would not reconcile you; not even the Breton jackets with scriptural stories embroidered on them, nor the bagpipes.'
'Positively, you will not take us?'