'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.
'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous. A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half the world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in history for his exploit.'
'Then he is no true lover.'
'Are there any true lovers?'
'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'
'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough; but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'
'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal; the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sensitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consolation because it is a sedative.'
'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the primæval woods, the fons sylvæ, the mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over him undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is made to laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'
'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great preoccupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'
'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'
'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'
'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I hope you will let me be carried by young children clad in white to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough for that? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and the Russian popes? I should have courage to execute your last wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to execute mine——Men are so much more timid than women!'
'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.
'Did I not say that men are cowards?'
'Not for ourselves; for those we love we are.'
She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly.
'Ah, my dear! who knows! Death would not be so dreadful to me as if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What is it? "Fis anus, et tamen," &c., &c., though that reproach perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own. Nowadays the perruquiers let nobody get grey, and there are a great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are entirely charming—more charming than the girls who are just out.'
'I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you will always be charming, and you will never be old.'
'One would think you were my lover!'
'Why will you never believe that I am still so?'
'Because I do not believe in any miracles; I go to no Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.'
'Or some exceptional reward.'
'Is not virtue always punished!' she said, with her enigmatical smile. 'You are a very handsome man, and have been the most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly expenditure. "Ah—ouiche, Madame!" said one of the peasants at Amyôt to me once, "where is love when you dip two spoons in one soup-pot?—you only quarrel about the onions." That is always the fault of marriage. It is always putting two spoons in one pot. Whether it is an earthen pitcher or a Cellini vase does not make the least difference. Poor love runs away from the clash of the spoons.'
Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. 'I should be miserable if I believed you were in earnest,' he said impatiently. 'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.'
'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a smile and a sigh, 'when men do not admire me any longer then you will not admire me either, I imagine; I wonder you do as it is—you see so much of me!'
'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and the most hopeless of her lovers.
'You fancy so; and that is very pretty in you, after so many years; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incurable scepticism upon her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of making themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has no great charm for me, and say what you will you cannot prevent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old!'
She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silver-framed mirror with its three glasses, showing her profile to her as she turned.
'I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,' she thought, with a little pang.
'Has not a poet said,' she added aloud:
I fear
Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness?'
There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with which she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by persiflage