'Did you ever smile so kindly on your own children?'
'I cannot say. I do not count my smiles. That poor little slave is interesting, he is an exile, and he will die in a year or two; my children are insufferably uninteresting; they have unchangeable health, intense stupidity, and will grow up to have every desire fulfilled, every caprice gratified, and to become that irresponsible, useless, tyrannical, anachronism--a Russian noble. Perhaps they will be good soldiers and kill a score of Asiatics. Perhaps they will only drink brandy, and gamble.'
Othmar did not reply; he was looking at the exquisite grace of her form, the tea-rose tint of her cheeks. Was it possible that she could be the mother of two stout, ugly, Tartar-faced boys? It seemed to him a profanation; a hideous incongruity. He did not like to think of it. If she had had a child at all it should have been some blossom-like creature, sharing her own grace as the catkin shares the willow's. The subtlest charm about her was that ethereality, as of a virginal goddess, which was blent in her with all the _finesses_ of seduction and of mind. The boldest man felt that in Nadine Napraxine the senses had hardly more empire than in the ivory Venus of the Greeks.
The eyes of Othmar dwelt on her now yearningly, sombrely, wistfully.
'It is of no use,' he said, abruptly. 'I did wrong to come here. If you wish for men who can, whilst they adore you, sit and drink chocolate and talk epigrams, seek elsewhere; I am not one of them. I can wear a mask, but it must be of iron, not of velvet.'
'The iron mask was of velvet,' said she, correcting him, unmoved by the repressed passion in his voice. 'All our illusions vanish under the electric light of history, and the iron mask is one of them. I daily expect to hear that Marie Antoinette was never guillotined, but succumbed at seventy to dropsy at Schönbrunn; we know it is proved that Jeanne d'Arc married and died, _bonne bourgeoise_, at Orleans, and her family enjoyed a pension for three generations from the town. It is very distressing, but it is all proved from the archives. Why shouldn't you drink chocolate? Perhaps you do not like it. Men like nothing that has sugar in it, except flattery. Ring. They will bring you anything else.'