stone.
'Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little dreamy lingering smile. 'Is not that what your brethren are always telling us?'
Melville answered with a sigh:
'May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some other?'
'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 'I think with you; the strongest argument (if any are strong) in favour of the future development of the soul, is the absolute impossibility for anybody with any average mind to be content with what he or she finds in human existence. Life is a pretty enough picture for people like ourselves; it is sometimes a pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but it is all wonderfully unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few hours of passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and insufficiency of it all. We have ideals which may be only remembrance, but if not must surely be prevision; ideals which, at any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything which belongs to earth.'
Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of wistful regret. It was not the mere dissatisfaction of the ennuyée which moved her. She had had her own way in life, and the success of it had become monotonous.
'Yes,' she repeated with a little laugh, which was not very gay; 'I suppose it must be the soul in us; that odd, unquiet, dissatisfied, nameless thing inside us, which is always crying, "Give, give, give!" and never gets what it wants. Our discontent must be the proof of something in us meant for better things, just as the eternal revolutions of Paris are the proof of its people's genius. What a night it is! It wants Lorenzo and Jessica, but they are not here. There are flirtations and intrigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are not of our world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.'
Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her guests, who were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, as the sounds of music, in the ever-youthful 'Invitation à la Valse,' called them, with midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase Melville strayed away by himself through the moonlit aisles of roses.
'Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of pleasure,' he thought. 'Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly balanced than the wooden shoe and the ragged stocking will ever believe. Perhaps in life, as they said to-day that it is in love, hunger is a happier state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo had never married Jessica, he would have written sonnets to her all his life, as Petrarca wrote them to Laura! The Lady of Amyôt is the most interesting woman I have ever known, but she is the one person on earth capable of making me doubt the faith that I have lived and hope to die for; when I am amongst the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa, I can still believe in the human soul; but when I am with her I doubt—I doubt—I doubt! She is as exquisitely organised as this gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams; but she believes that she will have only her one brief passage on earth like the gloxinia—the glory of a day—and alas! who shall prove that she is wrong? When she holds my creed in the hollow of her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a daisy that is dead!'
CHAPTER III.
'Bulwer has said that none preserve imagination after forty; does anyone preserve illusions after thirty?' said a very pretty woman on her thirty-second birthday.
Her husband chivalrously replied, 'Any one who lives beside you will preserve them until he is a hundred.'
She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile which was a little cynical and a little pensive.
'I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a little regretfully. 'I do not know why you should have found me so favourable to yours—if you have found me favourable,' she added, after a pause.
As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could give, he kissed her hands.
She glanced at her face in the mirror; she was certainly thirty-two years old on this last day of February. She did not like it; no woman likes it. The way is not actually longer because the traveller reads on a milestone the cipher which tells him how many thousands of yards he has traversed and has still to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and distastefully testifies to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue which the road has given.
'If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 'when they reach the age I am now, what a good thing it would be for the world. On her thirtieth birthday every woman ought to be put to death; mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the "Faute de l'Abbé Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put to death.'
'The world,' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid of its most perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.'
'And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, and how much effort and heartburning would be spared, if every woman died before she began to "make up!" Do you know last night, in the mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot all about them. I only looked at my own face; it seemed to me that there was a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which has been some years done; not age exactly, but the shadow of age which was coming up behind me as the men were coming, and was looking over my shoulder as they looked. Why do you laugh? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when the voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, "Ah, Madame, is it possible? Do you reject us all?" I had quite forgotten where I was, and why they were all waiting. Perhaps Age only meant to say to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any more!"'
'If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with it,' said her companion. 'If you will allow me to say so, I do not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. What bee has stung you to-day?'
'Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.'
'Surely that depends on one's mood?'
'Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am in another mood I shall say to myself that I have ten years left in which I shall be agreeable to myself and other people; that the young girls do not understand men and do not influence them; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her power to please and to be pleased. There are five hundred sophisms with which I can console myself, but just now I am not in a humour to be consoled by them. I am only sensible of what is very frightful to think of—that a woman is allotted threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health; she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delightful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the romance.'
He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince you when you are in a pessimistic humour.'
'Oh yes; into one's character, as into the characters of others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then; the moments are not agreeable; they are the flashes of a policeman's lanthorn; while they are shining disguise is not possible.'
'What do you see when they flash upon me?'
'Not very much that I would have changed except your sentimentalities.'
'I am grateful.'
She looked at him curiously. 'Did you doubt it?'
He answered, 'Well, no; not precisely. But with such a character as yours
