'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said her companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you to-day?'
'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'
'Surely that depends on one's mood?'
'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall be agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased. There are five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is allotted threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health; she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the romance.'
He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when you are in a pessimistic humour.'
'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'
'What do you see when they flash upon me?'
'Not very much that I would have changed except your sentimentalities.'
'I am grateful.'
She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'
He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as yours one never knows.'
'Is not that the charm of my character?'
'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of your immense thoughts.'
'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than he; but I have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it tends to make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age looked into the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear; after ten years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I am sure you are sincere when you make them.'
She smiled and rose.
This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young enough, and had potent charm enough, of which she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns.
Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike voices, 'Bonne fête, maman.'
'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make no difference in their worship of you.'
She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.
But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a sommation respectueuse, because he wants to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are fond of me now, certainly.'
'They will as certainly love you always.'
'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never could help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very grim prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part them. Why does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her immediate heir? Why is the crown prince always arrayed against the crown?'
'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his young son to him.
'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the separation begins and the antagonism rises.'
'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'
'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the time should come which will make me twice that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It will not console me in the least that my grandchildren may wish me bonne fête.'
'I wonder if you are serious?'
'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence is nothing but a dégringolade for her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'
'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'
'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de Grignan rewarded her? Myself, je n'ai pas cette bosse là. You know it very well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I do not think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'
'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'
She smiled.
'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer white shoulders. And——'
'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self?'
'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.
'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those men——'
'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's love is always so made up