'The world looks as if God washed it clean every morning,' she thought. 'It gets soiled before noon. Decidedly it is only the birds who are innocent enough for the sunrise.'
The latent sadness of the Russian character was in her, beneath her _insouciance_ and her pessimism and her irony: sometimes she wished she had not been born to that world in which she lived, where there is no pause for reflection, but only a continuous succession of spectacles, excitations, revelries, where no one is ever alone, where no one has ever time to note a wild flower grow or a sun sink to the west, where the babble of society is for ever on the ear, and Nature has no place at all except as a _décor de théâtre_ of which no one thinks more than the actor thinks of the painted canvas behind him with its bridge or its garden or its windmill.
'I do believe I should have liked to have been a poor woman and have married such a man as Millet or Corot,' she thought to herself now as she walked along the alley of bay that ran parallel with the sea. Then she laughed at the idea of herself, living in a cottage in a French wood, without any lace, without any diamonds, without any toilettes, looking for a dusty footsore artist coming home through the trees to his _pot au feu_. Somehow the artist in her fancy had the features of Othmar,--of Othmar, who was a prince of the Bourses and could no more escape the world than she could!
It scarcely surprised her when she saw him in person, as though her thoughts had compelled him to come thither. He was alone, in a little boat, which drifted slowly past the sea-terrace of La Jacquemerille; his hands rested idly on the oars, and his eyes were looking upward at the house.
She leaned down through one of the openings of the wall of clipt bay, and thrust her rose satin hood over the water:
'Is it you, Othmar?' she said to him. 'What are you doing on the sea at eight o'clock? How astonished you look! Do you wonder what I am doing in the open air? They are all asleep comfortably, though they think I am courting death. Row to the stairs; you can breakfast with me.'
He hesitated, looking up at her with his head uncovered and his eyes dazzled by the delicate face that was peering forth from the framework of close-sheared bay boughs.