'Is not that the charm of my character?'
'I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in the recesses of your immense thoughts.'
'That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more profundity than he; but I have not so much as I had. Happiness is not intellectual; it tends to make one content, and content is stupidity; that is why Age looked into the cotillion mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No, you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear; after ten years of them they have a certain fadeur, though I am sure you are sincere when you make them.'
She smiled and rose.
This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was still young enough, and had potent charm enough, of which she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad shore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns.
Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much; it offers nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have burned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as morning slides past her and the shadows grow long.
Othmar, without other reply, opened the door of her dressing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike voices, 'Bonne fête, maman.'
'Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. 'Time will make no difference in their worship of you.'
She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, light curls.
But she said perversely, and a little sadly: 'My dear, how can one tell? That is only a phrase also. One never knows what children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time Otho may send me a sommation respectueuse, because he wants to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make her accept a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attaché. One never can tell. They are fond of me now, certainly.'
'They will as certainly love you always.'
'What an optimist you have grown! It is flattering to me,' she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some crystals of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing things as they are; you know I never could help it; and the relations of parents with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with, are often apt to alter to very grim prose as time goes on, and separate interests arise to part them. Why does no sovereign who ever lived like his or her immediate heir? Why is the crown prince always arrayed against the crown?'
'I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Othmar, as he drew his young son to him.
'He is not a crown prince yet; he is a baby. Wait until he does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take an opposite side in European politics to yourself. It is when the distinct Ego asserts itself in your child, in opposition to your own entity, that the separation begins and the antagonism rises.'
'You will always analyse so mercilessly!'
'I can never be content with the world's commonplaces and sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am thirty-two years old, no persuasion on earth would convince me that, when the time should come which will make me twice that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It will not console me in the least that my grandchildren may wish me bonne fête.'
'I wonder if you are serious?'
'I was never more so, I assure you. Life is a series of losses; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows or about her mouth, existence is nothing but a dégringolade for her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire by becoming a grandmother is wholly absurd.'
'You always allot such a small space to the affections!'
'Madame de Sévigné allotted the largest that any clever woman ever did or could. Do you think the chill philosophies of Madame de Grignan rewarded her? Myself, je n'ai pas cette bosse là. You know it very well. I am fond of these children, because they are yours; but I do not think them in the least a compensation for growing old!'
'As if years mattered to a woman of your wit!'
She smiled.
'That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. Men prefer white shoulders. And——'
'And your shoulders?' said Othmar, with a smile. 'Are they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self?'
'Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently.
'For myself,' he added, 'I shall be delighted when the faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I detest all those men——'
'Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were none of them you would say to yourself, "Really, she is very much aged." A man's love is always so made up of pride and prejudice that if no one envy him what he has he soon ceases to value it. On the whole, men go much more by the opinion of the world than women do. A woman, if she take a fancy to a cripple, or a hunchback, or a crétin, makes herself ridiculous over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at; but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion of the galerie.'
'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some ill humour.
'Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, 'only I think you are, in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way more nervous. A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, would burn down half the world to get at it; a man would hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also be preoccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in history for his exploit.'
'Then he is no true lover.'
'Are there any true lovers?'
'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'
'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough; but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'
'Do
