'Heavens and earth!' he thought, 'if you let yourself be magnetised at the first sight of an imagined rival, what will you do before the reality when you meet it? My poor little girl! It is not the women who adore a man, and are struck dumb because they see another woman whom he has once loved, who obtain any influence over him, or possess any charm whatever for him. Who is to tell you that? who is to open your eyes and harden your heart? who is to make you understand that you are as lovely as the morning, but that if you do not acquire self-control, wit, indifference, all the armoury of the world's weapons, she will pass over you as artillery sweeps over the daisy in the grass.'
But he could not say his impatient thoughts aloud; he could not even, by his own readiness of language and easy persiflage, contrive wholly to hide the uneasiness and restraint which the presence of her guest brought upon Yseulte, and which she herself was at once too young and too frank to dissemble. They amused the Princess Napraxine, and they gratified her infinitely. She had not the slightest pity for them; she had never suffered from any such awkwardness herself.
'You are cruel, Princess,' Melville ventured to murmur as he rose and bade her adieu.
'Have you only now discovered that?' said Nadine. 'And I do not know why you should discover it especially now, or why, even if it were truth, you should be in any way astonished. Thirty years of the confessional should have taught you that women are always cruel. Are you never cruel?' she said aloud, turning to Yseulte. 'Ah, then, your dog will disobey you and your horse run away with you, my dear Countess!'
'Is there no power in affection?' said Yseulte bravely, feeling her colour come and go, and conscious that she had made an absurd reply.
Madame Napraxine smiled with a little look of indulgent amusement, which made the girl thrill to the tips of her fingers.
'You are still in the age of illusions, my love. I dare say you even write poetry. Do you not write poetry? I am sure you must have a little velvet book and a silver pencil somewhere. It is so delightful to see anyone so young,' she added, with seriousness, to Friederich Othmar. 'The children are not young now, are never young. I do not think I ever was; I have no recollection of it. If I had daughters, I would send them to those Dames de Sainte Anne--away in Brittany, is it not?--if it be they who have made your nephew's wife what she is. I did not believe there was any place left, simple enough and sweet and solemn enough to make a girlhood like a garden lily. Othmar has been very happy to have gathered the lily.'