'The gum and I were made as we are by nature. Blame nature. The men and the flies would do worse if they did not do that. And pray do not talk about my lovers; I have none.'
'You have no serfs in Russia, but you have moujiks; and it is still much the same thing, as far as their submission goes.'
'You are really too sarcastic, Wilkes. Was Cri-Cri's champagne bad? Surely not. But there must be something you have not digested. Perhaps it is the caviare sandwiches. Here we are, at home. Do go to bed and dream of your gum, your rabbit, and your bottle of morphine. None of these things can swim, but I, who am a combination of them, can; and I shall be swimming under your window whilst you sleep.'
The carriage stopped at the foot of the terrace of La Jacquemerille, and she descended, aided by Geraldine, who, with her husband, had arrived a few minutes earlier.
Lady Brancepeth hurried indoors, conscious, with the consciousness of thirty-five years, that the morning light was not becoming after a ball. Nadine Napraxine, with the equally conscious immunity of an exquisite complexion, and of that kind of beauty which is like a sea-shell, unwound the lace from about her delicate head, and paused in the doorway, looking seaward.
'I shall not go to bed,' she said, as the rays of the sunrise touched the gilded pinnacles and vanes of La Jacquemerille. 'I shall go and get into a peignoir, then breakfast, and then bathe. It is so stupid to go to bed when the sun is up. Platon, you look like a bear awaked before he has done hybernating. Did you not get sleep enough in de Vannes' _fumoir_?'
'I never get sleep enough,' replied Napraxine, good-humouredly but drowsily; 'and you do a very foolish thing if you stand there, Princess, in a frost, at seven o'clock, after five hours of the cotillon!'
'There is no frost; look at the geraniums; and I never take cold; that is not my malady at all; I am not so silly.'
'When you cannot live in Russia because the tubercles on your lungs----'
'Dr. Thiviers is responsible for the tubercles. One is obliged to say something civil to get away from a Court. It is always safe to say one suffers with one's lungs; nobody can ask to look at them. Pray go to bed, and dream of Nirvana, if you know what it means.'