“_Pouf!_” cried Madame. “We! We are world-dried and weather-beaten. We have not a worm-eaten emotion between us. I am seventy, and you, who are thirty-five, are the elder of the two. Bah! At that girl’s age I had the heart of a dove.”
“But that is long ago,” murmured M. Renard, as if to himself. It was quite human that he should slightly resent being classed with an unamiable grenadier of seventy.
“Yes!” with considerable asperity. “Fifty years!” Then, with harsh voice and withered face melted suddenly into softness quite _naïve, “Mon Dieu!_” she said, “Fifty years since Arsène whispered into my ear at my first opera, that he saw tears in my eyes!”
It was at this instant that there appeared in the Villefort box a new figure,--that of a dark, slight young man of graceful movements,--in fact, a young man of intensely striking appearance. M. Villefort rose to receive him with serious courtesy, but the pretty American was not so gracious. Not until he had seated himself at her side and spoken to her did she turn her head and permit her eyes simply to rest upon his face.
“Enter,” he remarked in a low tone,--“enter M. Ralph Edmondstone, the cousin of Madame.”
His companion asked no questions, but he proceeded, returning to his light and airy tone:--
“M. Ralph Edmondstone is a genius,” he said. “He is an artist, he is a poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie--in the day of Euphrasie--awakened the admiration of the sternest critics: they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics also could scarcely choose between these and his songs to Aglæ in her day, or Camille in hers. He is a young man of fine fancies, and possesses the amiable quality of being invariably passionately in earnest. As he was serious in his sentiments yesterday, so he will be to-morrow, so he is to-day.”
“To-day!” echoed Madame de Castro. “Nonsense!”
Madame Villefort did not seem to talk much. It was M. Ralph Edmondstone who conversed, and that, too, with so much of the charm of animation that it was pleasurable even to be a mere looker-on.
One involuntarily strained one’s ears to catch a sentence,--he was so eagerly absorbed, so full of rapid, gracefully unconscious and unconventional gesture.