One had been in love with her for a year; the other two years before had loved her. There was a considerable difference in the two passions, which she, with her analytical mind, could perfectly appraise.
For the one she was quite sure of her sentiment in return. He was good-looking, agreeable, useful, submissive; he diverted her sometimes, wearied her occasionally, obeyed her always. She liked him, and liked better still to tease him. The other had brought into her life a sense of a stormier emotion than she cared to raise. He had been more in earnest than she chose to allow; he had loved her imperiously, ardently, unreasonably; when she had made light of it, he had left her with indignation and scorn. He had been one of those who had fought a duel about her, though none but himself and his adversary had ever known that she was the cause of it, a card at _écarté_ having served as the colourable pretext. She had never been quite sure what she had felt for him; admiration in a way, perhaps, but more, she thought, dislike. But his had been one of the conquests which had most flattered her. When he had left all his habits and friends and possessions to plunge into Asian solitudes, she had felt that her power over him was illimitable. And now he had returned and told her, with as much chill assertion as a regard could convey, that her power existed no more for him. She did not care, but the change interested her, and piqued her.
'Poor Othmar!' she had said often to herself, when remembering the passages which had passed between them, and thinking of him in Asia; and now he was back from Asia, and sitting on her garden-terrace at La Jacquemerille, and was telling her by manner and by glance--perhaps telling her too persistently and insistantly for it to be entirely true--that he had vanquished his madness.
It had been a strong if short-lived madness, born first in a country-house in the Ardennes, in autumn-woods and tapestried galleries and the stately revelries of a Legitimist party of pleasure, fanned by her own will into flame in the course of a brilliant, giddy, insensate winter season in Paris. Then with spring had come the decisive moment when he had declined to be content any longer with his position, and he had been lightly laughed at, disdainfully jested with; and had revolted, and had gone out of Europe after a duel which had made even her tranquil pulses beat a little quickly in apprehension of the possible issue.