"Who is the man with the red face and peaked moustache beneath the camellia there?" Edgar asks his old acquaintance Prince Suwarin, whom he has just met.
"That is a certain Cabouat de Hauterive, a millionaire, who is very fond of pretty things," replies Suwarin. "A little while ago he bought a superb Rousseau for his gallery, and now, they say, he intends to buy a pretty wife for his house. But he is absolutely lacking in the very _A_, _B_, _C_ of æsthetic knowledge. The picture-dealer, Arthur Stevens, selected his Rousseau for him. I should like to know who found a wife for him. Whoever it was had good taste, I must say. The stupid fellow brags to all his acquaintances of the beauty of his new acquisition. She's a countrywoman of yours, if I'm not mistaken,--the young girl there beside him. She is simply divine!"
In fact, she is exquisitely lovely. How can Stasy presume to slander her so brutally? Truly it would be difficult to imagine anything more modest, more innocent, than the slender creature beside that broad-shouldered parvenu! Her elbows pressed close to her sides, her hands in her lap, with drooping head she sits there deadly pale, and evidently trembling with dread, as if awaiting sentence of death.
"It is a crime to force a young girl thus," Rohritz mutters between his set teeth. "I would not for the world have Thérèse's work to answer for. Fool that I am!--fool!"
Every drop of blood in his veins boils; for a moment it seems as if the sight of that pale, sad, child-like face must rob him of all self-control, as if thus at the last moment he must snatch her from the glittering, terrible fate to which she has devoted herself and bear her off in his arms, far, far away, to a peaceful green country where in the dreamy evening twilight stands a white castle in the shade of a mighty linden, where the odour of the linden-blossoms mingles on the evening breeze with the fragrance of the large, pale roses which look up from the dark verdure to the blue evening skies, where the music of gently-rustling leaves blends sadly with the sobbing ripple of the Save!
None but a maniac, however, would in our civilized century yield to such an impulse. Edgar is by no means a maniac: he is even too well bred to show the slightest outward sign of his agitation. Calmly, his eye-glass in his eye, he stands beside Suwarin and answers intelligibly and connectedly his questions as to the new Viennese ballet.