Meanwhile Melville, who had come to take his leave before proceeding to Paris under orders from the Vatican, found his hostess evidently ennuyÉe; she was not in her usual serene humour.

‘What has irritated you, Princess?’ that very observant person presumed at last to ask. ‘Have you actually discovered that doubled rose-leaf of whose existence you have been always sure and I always sceptical?’

‘The doubled rose-leaf is that enormous nuisance, la bÊtise humaine,’ she replied with ennui, breaking off some blossoms of an odontoglossum standing near her. ‘It is like the fog in London, it penetrates everywhere, you cannot escape it; there has been no rose-glass made which could shut it out. If Balzac had written for centuries, he would never have come to an end of it. Do you ever find any variety in your confessional? I never do in my drawing-rooms.’

‘And yet who should find it, if not Madame Napraxine?’ said Melville, who, when in his worldly moods, did not especially care to be reminded that he was a churchman.

‘I do not know who should,—I know that I never do,’ she replied. ‘I have made la chasse au caractÈre ever since I was old enough to know what character meant; and my only wonder is how, out of such a sameness of material, St.-Simon and La BruyÈre and Ste.-Beuve, and all those people who write so well, ever were able to make such entertaining books. I suppose it is done by the same sort of science which enables mathematicians to make endless permutations out of four numbers. For myself, I should like other numbers than those we know by rote.’

‘Good heavens!’ thought Melville, ‘when men have died because she laughed! Is that so very commonplace? or, is it not tragic enough?’

Aloud he said, in his courtliest manner:

‘Princess, I fear the sameness of human nature tries you so greatly because of the sameness of the emotions which you excite in it; I can imagine that too much adoration may cloy like too much sugar. Also, in your chasse au caractÈre you have, like all who hunt, left behind you a certain little bourgeois quality called pity; an absurd little quality, no doubt, still one which helps observation. I am sure you have read Tourguenieff’s little story of the quail?’

‘Yes; but one eats them still, you know, just the same as if he had never written it. Pity may be a microscope, I do not know; besides, you must admit that a quail is a much lovelier little life than a man’s, and so can excite it so much more easily. A quail is quite a charming little bird. Myself, I never eat birds at all; it is barbarous.’

‘What I meant to say was,’ suggested Melville, ‘that, in that tiny tale, Tourguenieff, like a poet, as he was, at heart, describes precisely what sympathy will do to open the intelligence to the closed lives of others, whether bird or man. Perhaps, madame, sympathy would even do something to smooth the creases out of your rose-leaf—if you tried it.’

‘I suppose I am not sympathetic,’ said Nadine Napraxine, stripping the petals of the odontoglossum; ‘they all say so. But I think it is their own fault; they are so uninteresting.’

‘The quail,’ said Melville, ‘to almost everybody is only a little juicy morsel to be wrapped in a vine-leaf and roasted; but Tourguenieff had the vision to see in it the courage of devotion, the heroism of maternity, the loveliness of its life, the infinite pathos of its death. Yet, the exceptional estimate of the student’s view of it was quite as true as the general view of the epicure.’

‘Am I an epicure?’ said Nadine Napraxine, amused.

‘Spiritually, intellectually, you are,’ replied Melville; ‘and so nothing escapes the fastidiousness of your taste; yet perhaps, madame, something may escape the incompleteness of your sympathies.’

‘That is very possible; but, as I observed to Lady Brancepeth when she made me a similar reproach, one is as one is made. One is Tourguenieff or one is Brillat-Savarin, all that is arranged beforehand for one—somewhere.’

Melville had learned the ways of the world too well not to know how to glide easily, with closed eyes and averted ears, over such irreverences; but he ventured to say:

‘One cannot dispute the fact of natural idiosyncrasy and inclination, of course; but may not one’s self-culture be as much of the character as of the mind? Might it not become as interesting to strive and expand one’s moral as one’s intellectual horizon? It seems so to me, at the least.’

She laughed, and rang a little silver bell for Mahmoud to bring them some fresh tea.

‘My dear Monsignore,’ she said, with amusement and admiration; ‘for enwrapping a kernel of religious advice in an envelope of agreeable social conversation, there is not your equal anywhere—you may well be beloved of the Propaganda! But, alas! it is all wasted on me.’

Melville reddened a little with irritation:

‘I understand,’ he answered. ‘I fear, Princess, that you are like Virschow or Paul Bert, who are so absorbed in cutting, burning, and electrifying the nerves of dogs that the dog, as a sentient creature, a companion, and a friend, is wholly unknown to them. Humanity, poor Humanity, is your dog.’

‘Will you have some tea?’ she said, as Mahmoud brought in her service made by goldsmiths of the Deccan, who sat on mats under their banana trees, with the green parrots flying over the aloes and the euphorbia, and who produced work beside which all the best which Europe can do with her overgrown workshops is clumsy, inane, and vulgar.

‘What you suggested was very pretty,’ she continued, pouring out the clear golden stream on the slices of lemon; ‘and I had no right to laugh at you for wrapping up a sermon in nougat. Of course the character ought to be trained and developed just like the body and the mind, only nobody thinks so; no education is conducted on those lines. And so, though we overstrain the second, and pamper the third, we wholly neglect the first. I imagine that it never occurs to anyone out of the schoolroom to restrain a bad impulse or uproot a bad quality. Why should it? We are all too busy in trying to be amused, and failing. Do you not think it was always so in the world? Do you suppose La BruyÈre, for instance, ever turned his microscope on himself? And do you think, if he had done, that any amount of self-scrutiny would have made La BruyÈre Pascal or Vincent de Paul?’

‘No; but it might have made him comprehend them, or their likenesses. I did not mean to moralise, madame; I merely meant that the issue of self-analysis is sympathy, whilst the issue of the anatomy of other organisations is cruelty even where it may be wisdom.’

‘That may be true in general, and I daresay is so; but the exception proves the rule, and I am the exception. Whenever I do think about myself I only arrive at two conclusions; the one, that I am not as well amused as I ought to be considering the means I have at my disposal, and the other is that, if I were quite sure that anything would amuse me very much, I should sacrifice everything else to enjoy it. Neither of those results is objective in its sympathies; and you would not, I suppose, call either of them moral.’

‘I certainly should not,’ said Melville, ‘except that there is always a certain amount of moral health in any kind of perfect frankness.’

‘I am always perfectly frank,’ said the Princess Nadine; ‘so is Bismarck. But the world has made up its mind that we are both of us always feigning.’

‘That is the world’s revenge for being ruled by each of you.’

‘Is it permitted in these serious days for churchmen to make pretty speeches? I prefer your scoldings, they are more uncommon.’

‘The kindness which permits them is uncommon,’ said Melville, as he took up his tea-cup.

‘Ah! I can be kind,’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘ Ask Mahmoud and my little dog. But then Mahmoud is dumb, and the dog is—a dog. If humanity were my dog, too, as you say, I should make it aphone!’

‘Poor humanity!’ said Melville, with a sigh. ‘If it would not offend you, Princess, there are two lines of MÜrger which always seem to me to exactly describe the attitude, or rather the altitude, from which you regard all our sorrows and follies.’

‘And they are?’

‘They are those in which he thinks he hears:

only we must substitute for aigu some prettier word, say perlÉ.’

She laughed, thinking of Boris Seliedoff, with more perception of his absurdities than of his offences, as her first movement of wrath subsided into that ironical serenity which was most natural to her of all her varying moods.

‘The violoncello does not know itself why it weeps,’ she replied, ‘so why should the fife not laugh at it? Really, if I were not so impious a being, I would join your Church for the mere pleasure of confessing to you; you have such fine penetration, such delicate suggestion. But then, there is no living being who understands women as a Catholic priest does who is also a man of the world. Adieu! or rather, I hope, au revoir. You are going away for Lent? Ours will soon be here. I shock every Russian because I pay no heed to its sanctity. Did you ever find, even amongst your people, any creatures so superstitious in their religion as Russians? Platon is certainly the least moral man the sun shines on, but he would not violate a fast nor neglect a rite to save his life. It is too funny! Myself, I have fish from the Baltic and soups (very nasty ones) from Petersburg, and deem that quite concession enough to CarÊme. My dear Monsignore, why should there be salvation in salmon and sin in a salmis?’

Melville was not at all willing to enter on that grave and large question with so incorrigible a mocker. He took his leave, and bowed himself out from her presence; whilst Nadine Napraxine went to her own rooms to dress for dinner and look at the domino which she would wear some hours later at a masked ball which was to take place that night in her own house in celebration of the last evening of the Catholic Carnival.

she murmured inconsequently, as she glanced at the elegant disguise and the Venetian costume to be worn beneath it which had been provided for her. ‘That is the sort of feeling which one likes to inspire, and which one also prefers to feel. Always the mask, smiling, mysterious, unintelligible, seductive, suggestive of all kinds of unrealised, and therefore of unexhausted pleasures; never the face beneath it, the face which frowns and weeps and shows everything, is unlovely, only just because it is known and must in due time even grow wrinkled and yellow. How agreeable the world would be if no one ever took off their masks or their gloves!’