"I have the effrontery to believe," said the Baroness, "that he is, in reality, in love with me."
"Especially after hearing him last night," the Grand Duke suggested.
"That scene, your Highness, we had carefully rehearsed--oh, seven or eight times! Personally, I agreed with your Highness that the quotation from Theocritus was pedantic, but Philippe insisted on it, you conceive--"
The Grand Duke gazed meditatively upon the Baroness, who had the grace to blush.
"Then it was," he asked, "a comedy for my benefit?"
"You would never have consented--" she began. But the Grand Duke's countenance, which was slowly altering to a greenish pallor, caused her to pause.
"You will get over it in a week, Louis," she murmured, "and you will find other--baronesses."
"Oh, very probably!" said his Highness, and he noted with pleasure that he spoke quite as if it did not matter. "Nevertheless, this was a despicable trick to play upon the Grand Duchess."
"Yet I do not think the Grand Duchess will complain," said the Baroness von Altenburg.
And it was as though a light broke on the Grand Duke. "You planned all this beforehand?" he inquired.
"The Grand Duchess suggested it, your Highness, the moment that she knew you thought of eloping."
"Louis," said the Baroness von Altenburg, in a semi-whisper, "your wife is one of those persons who cling to respectability like a tippler to his bottle. To her it is absolutely nothing how many women you may pursue--or conquer--so long as you remain here under her thumb, to be exhibited, in fair sobriety, upon the necessary public occasions. I pity you, my Louis." And she sighed with real compassion.
He took possession of one gloved hand. "At the bottom of your heart," his Highness said, irrelevantly, "you like me better than you do Monsieur de Châteauroux."
"I find you the more entertaining company, to be sure--But what a woman most wants is to be loved. If I touch Philippe's hand for, say, the millionth part of a second longer than necessity compels, he treads for the remainder of the day above meteors; if yours--why, you at most admire my fingers. No doubt you are a connoisseur of fingers and such-like trifles; but, then, a woman does not wish to be admired by a connoisseur so much as she hungers to be adored by a maniac. And accordingly, I prefer my stupid Philippe."