‘Is Madame Napraxine a good woman?’ said Yseulte timidly one day in her own drawing-room to Melville, whilst she coloured to the eyes as she pronounced the name.

‘Good, my dear!’ echoed Friederich Othmar, who overheard and replied to the question. ‘The epithet is comically incongruous. She would be as horrified if she heard you as if you called her ma bourgeoise.’

Melville laughed a little despite himself, and hesitated before giving his own reply: he was embarrassed. How could he as a priest say to this innocent creature what he as a man of the world knew to be the truth; that the simple classifications of good and bad can no more suffice to describe the varieties of human character than the shepherd’s simple names for herb and flower can suffice for the botanist’s floral nomenclature and complicated subdivisions.

‘She has very noble qualities,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps they are somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of her life; one I may tell you.’

And he related to her the episode of Boganof.

Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would for ever retain her power on him.

‘And she is so beautiful!’ she added, with a little sigh. Melville looked at her in surprise.

‘Who has been talking to her?’ he wondered as he said aloud:

‘There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror, my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination, some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled; ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic coups de tÊte; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living any other; the RÉnÉ of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a God.’

‘Except her tailor!’ said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.

‘Pardon me,’ said Melville, with a smile. ‘Madame Napraxine’s tailor is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters. The king of couturiers trembles before her, he is so afraid of her displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes la pluie et le beau temps in the world of fashion.’

‘And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?’ murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt was the enemy of her life.

‘You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions, my dear,’ interrupted the Baron; ‘for you have one beside you every day in Otho’s. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband’s—and some other people’s—is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and as indefinite as any impressionniste’s picture.’

Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face was very grave.

‘M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,’ said Melville, gaily. ‘Your age has destroyed the femme croyante. Nature, which always avenges herself, gives you the femme du monde, which, in its lowest stages, becomes the cabotine, and in its highest just such an ethereal, capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person of the Princess Napraxine.’

‘Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The two species of womankind have existed since the days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old story (I think it is in Moore’s Diary) of the grazier’s son who went to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact—that bullocks were very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.’

Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville, and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to acknowledge.

As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and announced ‘Madame la Princesse Napraxine.’

Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and smiling indifference which makes the most impenetrable of all masks. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor answered the courtesy she mechanically made.

Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue, and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to himself, ‘What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have those situations gone through, and over. The poor child!—so happy as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame Napraxine is precisely the same kind of charmeresse that Propertius used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the same.’

Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying:

‘Your people were unwilling to let me in because it was not your day; but I insisted. When one desires a thing very much one always insists till one gets it. I find Paris talking of nothing but the Countess Othmar; I was eager to claim from her the privilege of an old friend.’

It was said with sweetness, apparent frankness, and all her own inimitable grace. She lightly touched, with the softest, slightest kiss, the cheeks of Yseulte, which grew warm and then cold. Not appearing to notice her embarrassment, Nadine Napraxine continued to string her pretty, careless, courteous phrases together with that tact which is the most useful and the most graceful of all the talents. Yseulte had all a girl’s embarrassment before her, and that dignity which was an instinct in her became, by contrast, almost stiffness.

‘Someone has told her of me,’ thought Nadine, with amusement and irritation combined. It at once offended her and pleased her that she should be a source of pain to this girl—to how many women had she been so, and without mercy! Well, why would they not learn to keep to themselves the wandering thoughts of their lovers and their lords? ‘This child is beautiful,’ she said to herself with candour; ‘how can she fail with him. No doubt she loves him herself; men are not thankful. Tenez la dragÉe haute is the only motto for their subjection.’

She studied Yseulte with attention and interest, and without malice. She frankly admired this beauty so different to her own; this union of high-bred stateliness and childish naÏvetÉ which seemed to her just such a manner as some young chÂtelaine of some old Breton or Norman tower would have had in the days of the Reine Isabeau; she did full justice to it. The irritation she had felt when she had walked in the moonlight through the grass lands at ZaraÏzoff, and thought of the chÂteau of AmyÔt, had ceased the moment that she had entered the atmosphere of Paris. Othmar had believed that he had been cold as marble in that momentary meeting, but she had seen in it that her power over him was undiminished. She knew very well that soon or late he who had defied her would be once more as a reed in her hands. She was in no haste to try her force; she could rely on it in the calmness of certainty. She was very amiable to his wife; but she had a little touch of good-natured condescension in her amiability which made the pride of the girl shrink as under an affront which could not be resented; the very young always suffer under a kindness which tacitly reminds them, by its unspoken superiority, of their own inexperience and their own defects. The ironical smile, the slight suggestive phrases, the very indulgence, as to a child, of Nadine Napraxine were as so many thorns in the heart of Yseulte, who had none of that vanity which might have rendered her indifferent to them.

It was not so much an emotion, but a certain sentiment—half interest, half irritation—which brought her to the great house of which, in a moment of impulse, he had made this child mistress. ‘They try to give it a false air of home,’ she thought, with her merciless accuracy of penetration, ‘but they do not succeed. It is always a barn—a barn gilded and painted like Versailles: but a barn. Perhaps they succeed better at AmyÔt, and perhaps they do not. He always hated this huge house, and he was very right in his taste. It is made to entertain in, not to be happy in. If he were happy he would go far away to that castle by the blue Adrian Sea that I saw within a few leagues of Miramar.’

With that thought she had gone through the succession of great rooms, grand and uninteresting as the rooms of the Escurial, until she had reached one of the drawing-rooms, with its painted panels of children romping in orchards and gardens, and there had found Yseulte sitting at her tapestry like some young dame of the time of Bayard or the BÉarnais, a large hound at her feet, the two old men beside her.

‘What colouring! She is like a pastel of Emile LÉvy’s!’ she had thought, with an appreciation which was entirely sincere, as she kissed the girl’s reluctant, roseleaf-like cheek: she really felt not the slightest ill-will towards her; on the contrary, she was moved to a compassion, none the less genuine that it was based on something very like disdain; the disdain of the wise for the simple, of the certainly victorious for the predestined vanquished, of the snake-charmer for those who let the snake kill them.

With her most charming grace, with that seduction which made it impossible for anyone in her presence to be her enemy, she renewed her acquaintance with the wife of Othmar, speaking pretty and gracious words of recognition and of admiration. Yseulte preserved a self-control admirable for one so young, to whom the necessities for such reserve were a new and painful lesson; but she was unable to keep the change of colour in her cheeks, and the expression in her candid eyes betrayed her to the quick perception of her guest.

‘You have come to honour Paris, Princess?’ said the Baron, to cover the embarrassment and the constraint of Yseulte.

‘One always comes to Paris, Baron,’ answered Nadine Napraxine, raising her eyeglass and gazing at the girl through it, with all the cruel, careless scrutiny of a woman of the world; her luminous eyes wanted no assistance of the sort, but it was a weapon—unkind as a dagger on occasion. ‘One always comes to Paris. It is the toy-shop where we dolls of the world get mended when we are battered and bruised. We come for our hair, for our teeth, for our complexions; at any rate, for our gowns; and then when we arrive we remain. The Republic may push its iron roller, as Berlioz says it does, over the world; it rolls on wheels of lead; but it cannot prevent Paris from being always an empire, and always the urbs for us. I do not love Paris as passionately as most Russians do, yet even I admit that there is no other city where one finds so little monotony. Even in Paris, alas! as Marivaux said long ago, everybody has two eyes, one nose, and one mouth, and one sighs in vain for a little variety of outline.’

‘If I remember,’ said the Baron, ‘Marivaux was more merciful to humanity than is Madame Napraxine; he admitted that even with such homely materials as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, one could obtain infinite variety in expression; no two physiognomies are alike.’

‘Perhaps in Marivaux’s time men did not imitate the chic anglais!’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘I see very little variety myself. Everybody is terribly like everyone else, except the Comtesse Othmar,’ she added, with her charming smile, ‘who is only like Hope nursing Love, or some other picture of a fairer day than ours.’

Yseulte, pained at herself for her want of self-command, coloured hotly under the compliment, in which her alarmed sensitiveness fancied there was hidden a sarcasm. She did not know of what picture Nadine Napraxine spoke, and she thought—‘Does she mean that Hope was barren and foolish, that Love did not care?’ She remembered the silver amorino and the empty gourd.

Directly appealed to, a moment later, she murmured something at random; she did not well know what; she grew first pale, then red; she seemed constrained and stupid, void of ideas, and stiff in manner. Friederich Othmar could have broken his cane about her shoulders in his vexation.

‘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.’

There were both reality and admiration in many of her words, but the last phrase was not so sincere. Yseulte, overhearing, thought, with a pang, ‘She knows that he is not happy!’ Her heart swelled. She felt that this exquisite woman, so little her senior in actual years, so immeasurably her superior in knowledge, tact, and power, laughed at her even as she praised her. ‘How could she know that I wrote poetry?’ thought the child, conscious of many a poor little verse, the unseen, carefully-hidden, timid offspring of a heart too full, written with a pencil in the leafy recesses of the woods of AmyÔt, in that instinctive longing for adequate expression which is born of a great love. The chance phrase gave Nadine Napraxine in her sight all the irresistible fascination of a magician. She felt as if those languid, luminous eyes could read all the secrets of her soul—secrets so innocent, all pregnant with the memory of Othmar—secrets pure, wholesome, and harmless as the violets that the mosses hid in the Valois woods of AmyÔt.

‘Well, what do you think of her?’ asked Friederich Othmar when she had left the house. Yseulte hesitated.

‘I can believe that she has a great charm,’ she answered with some effort. ‘She has a fascination that one feels whether one will or no——’

She paused and unconsciously sighed.

‘She is the greatest charmeresse in Europe,’ replied Friederich Othmar. ‘No other words describe her. She is not a Cleopatra or a Mary Stuart. She would never have had an Actium or a Kirk’s Field. She would never have so blundered. She has no passions; she would be a better woman if she had. She is entirely chaste only because she is absolutely indifferent. It creates her immense power over men. She remains ice while she casts them into hell.’ He stopped abruptly, remembering to whom he spoke, and added, ‘Her visit was a most rare honour to you, my dear; she seldom deigns to go in person anywhere; her servants leave her cards, and the fortunate great ladies who are the recipients of them may go and see her on her day, and take their chance of receiving a few words from her. She is one of those exceptional women who have no intimate friends of their own sex, or hardly any; men——’

He paused, asked leave to light a cigarette, and walked with it awhile about the room. Yseulte did not take up his unfinished phrase by an interrogation.

‘Have you no inquisitiveness?’ thought Friederich Othmar. She was, indeed, full of restless and painful curiosity concerning the woman who had just left her presence, but she would not allow herself to utter a word of it. She thought it would be disloyalty to her husband.

Some fifteen minutes later Othmar himself entered.

‘Madame Napraxine has just honoured us in propri personÂ,’ said the Baron, looking at him with intention.

‘Indeed!’ said Othmar. ‘It was most amiable of her,’ he added, after a moment’s pause; but to the penetration or to the imagination of his uncle it seemed that he spoke with embarrassment and annoyance. Yseulte had resumed her work at her tapestry. The cruel sense that she was not wanted there, that she had been brought there only out of pity, as a kind hand gives a stray animal a home, weighed on her more and more. She did not see all that others saw in her; all the attraction of her youth, and her innocence and her beauty. She had too sincere a humility for any idea of her own charms to console her. She was wise enough to perceive that the world flattered her because she was a rich man’s wife, but in her own eyes she remained the same that she had been under the grey shadows of FaÏel.

‘If I were only myself again to-morrow, they would never think of me,’ she said to herself, with a wisdom born out of the poverty and obscurity in which her childish years had been spent. She was passionately grateful to Othmar, as well as devoted to him; but the suggestion that she was in no way necessary to his happiness, was even a burden and a constraint to him, had been harshly set before her by the words of Blanchette, and it was corroborated by a thousand trifles of look, and speech, and accident. His very entrance into her room had nothing of the warmth of a man who returns to what he loves; he came there so evidently because he felt that courtesy and custom required it of him.

The Baron understood what was passing in her thoughts as she bent her fair head over her tapestry-frame, the severity of her black velvet gown serving to enhance, by its contrast, the whiteness of her throat, the youthfulness of her features, the suppleness and vigour of her form. He longed to say to her, ‘My child, do not fret because he is no longer your lover—is even, perhaps, that of some one else; it is always so in marriage, even in love. There is always one who cares long, and one who cares little. It will not matter to you in the end; you will learn to lead your own life; you will have your children. I do not think you will have your lovers, as most of them do, but you will get reconciled to accepting life on a lower plane than your youthful imagination placed it on at first.’

He would have liked to say that, and much more, to her, but he did not venture. She made no confidence, no appeal for sympathy; and after all, for aught he knew, she might be entirely content with her husband’s ardour, or his lack of it. She was but a child still, and had little knowledge of the passions of men.

Othmar did not say that he had met his wife’s guest as she left his house.

She had given him her prettiest smile.

‘The Countess Othmar is quite lovely; and what a perfect manner!’ she had said. ‘What does she say to all your pessimism, to all your boutades? Does she understand them? You must send her to hear a course of Caro. Her mind can hardly be metaphysical yet. She is at the age to eat bonbons and expect caresses.’

Then she had made him a little careless sign of farewell, and her black horses had borne her through the great gates of gilded bronze of the house which always seemed to him oppressive as a gaol. The words were harmless, playful, amiable; yet they had annoyed him. He understood that she ridiculed his marriage, and that she divined that it had but little place in his affections, and as little hold upon his thoughts.

‘Poor child!’ he had said involuntarily, as he mounted his staircase to enter the presence of Yseulte.