“Spare me that ancient platitude. You have indulged in it so often.” Her voice was restrained and low, but there was a dangerous gleam in her eyes. Zouroff appealed in many ways to her passionate but rather hard nature, but there were times when his indifference, his brutal frankness, cut her to the quick.
But the Prince was not a man to pay more than passing heed to the symptoms of a woman’s gathering displeasure. By nature he was a savage. To a certain extent he was susceptible to female beauty and fascination, but deep down in his heart he had a profound contempt for women, for their uncontrolled feelings, their little tricks of sentiment, their abject subservience to their emotions.
“Things go well,” he said, in his hard, level tones. “I trust we shall not have to wait very long now. We held a very important meeting to-night; it was prolonged beyond the hour I expected. That is why I am late and could not get here in time to hear you sing.”
The beautiful singer seemed but half appeased by this rather curt apology. It confirmed what he had told her so often before, that overwhelming ambition, the advancement of his political schemes, were all powerful influences in his life; that a woman’s devoted affection weighed but as a feather in the scale against these.
“Let us talk of other things,” she said, speaking in a tone of assumed lightness.
“But I thought you took a great interest in these matters. At any rate you have pretended to.” His voice was hard and rasping, and there was a sneer in it, an angry gleam in his eyes. He could not bear to be crossed.
“At the proper time and place. But I don’t choose to talk of just one subject every moment we spend together. I am pleased, my friend, that the prospects are so good. And now, for a few seconds, shall we talk of those other things which are not quite so unimportant to the world in general as they appear to you.”
“And those other things?” inquired Zouroff in his surliest and most repellant manner.
“Well, for example, we have just been listening to our new Director of the Opera, Signor Corsini. He has played some very beautiful things; he is a fine artist. Have you met him yet?”