"Ah--!" said she. She was smiling at some reflection or other.
There was a pause. The Duc de Puysange drummed upon the window-pane; the Duchess, still faintly smiling, trifled with the thin gold chain that hung about her neck. Both knew their display of emotion to have been somewhat unmodern, not entirely _à la mode_.
"Decidedly," spoke de Puysange, and turned toward her with a slight grimace, "I am no longer fit to play the lover; yet a little while, madame, and you must stir my gruel-posset, and arrange the pillows more comfortably about the octogenarian."
"Ah, Gaston," she answered, and in protest raised her slender fingers, "let us have no more heroics. We are not well fitted for them, you and I."
"So it would appear," the Duc de Puysange conceded, not without sulkiness.
"Let us be friends," she pleaded. "Remember, it was fifteen years ago I made the grave mistake of marrying a very charming man--"
"--and I did not know that I was thereby denying myself the pleasure of his acquaintance. I have learned too late that marrying a man is only the most civil way of striking him from one's visiting-list." The Duchess hesitated. "Frankly, Gaston, I do not regret the past month."
"Yes," she admitted; "except those awkward moments when you would insist on making love to me."
"But no, madame," cried he, "it was precisely--"
"O my husband, my husband!" she interrupted, with a shrug of the shoulders; "why, you do it so badly!"
The Duc de Puysange took a short turn about the apartment. "Yet I married you," said he, "at sixteen--out of a convent!"
"Mon ami," she murmured, in apology, "am I not to be frank with you? Would you have only the connubial confidences?"
"Why, Gaston, it bored me to the very verge of yawning in my lover's countenance. I, too, had no idea but that it would bore you equally--"
"--or d'Arlanges, or--or any of them, was pleased to say. In fact, it was my duty to conceal from my husband anything which might involve him in duels. Now that we are friends, of course it is entirely different."
The Duchess smiled; the Duke walked up and down the room with the contained ferocity of a caged tiger.
"In duels! in a whole series of duels! So these seducers besiege you in platoons. Ma foi, friendship is a good oculist! Already my vision improves."