The Princess was too honourable a woman to depart from the text of the congratulation, but she contrived to throw a little more warmth into the spirit of it; and she did not show her letter to the mistress of Hohenszalras. She set the screen near her favourite chair in the blue-room.
'If only there were any one to appreciate it!' she said, with a sigh. 'Like everything else in this house, it might as well be packed up in a chest for aught people see of it. This place is not a museum; the world goes to a museum: it is a crypt!'
'Would it be improved by a crowd of sightseers at ten kreutzers a head?'
'No: but it would be very much brightened by a house-party at Easter, and now and then at midsummer and autumn. In your mother's time the October parties for the bear-hunts, the wolf-hunts, the boar-hunts, were magnificent. No, I do not think the chase contrary to God's will; man has power over the beasts of the field and the forest. The archdukes never missed an autumn here; they found the sport finer than in Styria.'
Her niece kissed her hand and went out to where her four black horses were fretting and champing before the great doors, and the winter sun was lighting up the gilded scrollwork, and the purple velvet, and the brown sables of her sleigh, that had been built in Russia and been a gift to her from Egon Vàsàrhely. She felt a little impatience of the Princess Ottilie, well as she loved her; the complacent narrowness of mind, the unconscious cruelty, the innocent egotism, the conventional religion which clipped and fitted the ways of Deity to suit its own habits and wishes: these fretted her, chafed her, oppressed her with a sense of their utter vanity. The Princess would not herself have harmed a sparrow or a mouse, yet it seemed to her that Providence had created all the animal world only to furnish pastime for princes and their jägers. She saw no contradiction in this view of the matter. The small conventional mind of her had been cast in that mould and would never expand: it was perfectly pure and truthful, but it was contracted and filled with formula.
Wanda von Szalras, who loved her tenderly, could not help a certain impatience of this, the sole, companionship she had. A deep affection may exist side by side with a mental disparity that creates an unwilling but irresistible sense of tedium and discordance. A clear and broad intelligence is infinitely patient of inferiority; but its very patience has its reaction in its own fatigue and silent irritation.