"They were generous—I allude to the conditions. Ninety men out of a hundred would have accepted them. For what has De Bayard to condone that others have not winked at? You were a mere girl, weary of separation from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea. Bored to desperation—condemned to spend your days in the care of a child, and in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a sick old devotee,—point out to me the woman, young, beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious—who would not—in your place—have done precisely as you did?"
She threw her head a little backward, bringing into prominence the superb modeling of her columnar throat and the heavy lines of the lower jaw. Her wine-colored eyes considered him between their narrowed lids. She savored his words, silently, with palpitating nostrils, and rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed lips. And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling in her strange character with sensuality, and pride, and recklessness, were written upon her beauty as plainly as they are stamped upon the individuality of a tigress, or a poisonous snake.
"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..." She spoke between her teeth, accentuating the vowels and prolonging the sibilants: "Nicolas, it was hellish—that ménage at Auteuil!..." She clenched the white hand that rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking with burning eyes through Straz into the past.
"That woman—my husband's mother, with her parade of devotion for the absent. With her ceaseless repetition of 'my son,' 'my son's child,' and 'my son's wife!' ... Grand Dieu!—how she enraged me! How she made me hate—hate—hate them!—yes! all three.... Perhaps myself also, most bitterly of all!"
"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented Straz, with his snigger: "'I draw water from a well that has no bottom when I tell my gossip of the faults of my mother-in-law!'"
She said, with undisguised scorn:
"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"
"Ah, but wait! Hear the rest of it!" said Straz, dexterously embroidering on the original: "'But when my mother-in-law wishes to acquaint my husband with my good qualities, she will write them with the plume from a gnat's head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's egg, when she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!'"
Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:
"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I said 'Your mother will console you, I have no doubt!' ... How often I have imagined I could hear her talking to him.... He would weep on her knees, like a schoolboy. She would lead him to look at the child, asleep in its cot by the side of her bed, and tell him, 'Do not fear! She will not be like her mother! She will grow up candid and discreet and virtuous!' Everything that Adelaide was not, you understand.... Ha, ha, ha! Absurd old creature! Were she not dead, I should detest her still!"