'I have not been to anything typhoid or choleraic this morning, or I should not be here to endanger your loveliness, Princess,' answered Melville. 'I have been where Poverty is--alas! where is she not?--and in our day those who wed with her regard it as a forced marriage, wholly joyless; and we cannot persuade them that there may be graciousness where she dwells if only cleanliness and content will sit down with her.'
'Oh, Monsignore, it is not only poverty that scares content, I can assure you,' said Madame Napraxine.
'If you be not content, who should be?' murmured Melville. 'With every possible gift of nature, culture, fate, and fortune showered upon you, why will you always persuade yourself, Princess, that your doubled rose-leaf mars everything? I do not believe the rose-leaf even exists!'
'I am not sure that it does, either,' replied Madame Napraxine; 'but I never remember to have felt contented in my life. Is content an intellectual quality? I doubt it. Perhaps it is a virtue; I dislike virtues.'
Melville was a sincerely pious Churchman, but even he did not dare to take up the cudgels in honour of poor virtue before this merciless speaker. He was satisfied with replying that content was not a quality which the tendencies of the waning nineteenth century were likely to foster.
'No!' said the Princess Napraxine. 'The note of our time is restlessness, and its chief attainment the increase of insanity.'
'If it did not sound too much like moralising, I should say that there was never any time in which there was so much self-indulgence and so little real rest,' said Melville, who had the sensitive fear of a man of the world of appearing to obtrude his own convictions, and to preach out of season and out of church.
'People require to have their brains and their consciences very clear and very calm to enjoy rest. It is the reward which nature reserves for her good children,' said Lady Brancepeth.
'I must be very good, then,' said Madame Napraxine with her little mysterious smile, 'for I rest absolutely. To know how to do nothing is a great secret of health and of comfort; but you must not wait till you are fatigued to do nothing, or you cannot enjoy it.'
'And I suppose you must occasionally be deaf to duty knocking at the door?'