It was true. Lilla, who had suffered so much from her exceptional temperament, could not bear to see others suffer; and in the grip of her own weaknesses she had always felt compassion for the weak.
"But I ought not to come here," she said.
She explained that in this place she "felt her worthlessness." It would be better, she thought, to remain in the Brassfield state of mind: thus one might find an anodyne for this sense of insignificance. For, to those others, of course, wealth and social position were the important things in life, magnificently making up for the lack of other qualities. If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors—as elements created for no other reason than to enhance their triumphs. Debussy, she suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world. In that region of inverted values one took on the egotism of the fabled frog in the well, who laughed to scorn the frog that came to tell him of the ocean.
"But the well is so prettily gilded," Lilla remarked. "And it's lined with so many nice little mirrors in Louis XVI frames, that you can hardly blame the frog if he imagines that his importance, like his reflections, extends to the ends of the earth, in that multiplied glitter of gilt."
Brantome began to laugh, then turned serious.
"You must be desperate," he commented.
"That is your fault. I've always had a longing for what I find in these rooms; but that longing isn't backed up by any capacity. When one of these friends of yours has suffered a loss, his art still remains. And maybe it becomes a richer art because of his loss."
She sighed, her pale brown cheek resting against her black-gloved hand, her black fur collar framing her neck on which the strand of pearls was less lustrous than the teeth between her parted lips.
His leonine old visage grew soft as he looked at her, and under his white mustaches of a Viking there appeared a sad smile, as if he were thinking that things might have been different with him, had she, with this beauty and these predilections, been young when he had been young.
"Oh, no, you must not stop coming here," he protested gently. "It's only right that these poor fellows should have their glimpses of a composite of all the beautiful muses—who, as you'll remember, were not themselves practitioners in the arts, but the inspirers of artists. Isn't there, for women, besides the joys of personal accomplishment, another satisfaction, which one might call vicarious?"