Othmar coloured with anger and self-consciousness. He knew very well that she meant to imply that he sent his wife into the world as Count Platoff had given his daughter 'Gil Blas.' Conscience would not allow him a disclaimer, even if a sense of ridicule in her reminiscences, apparently so ill-timed, had permitted him to make one.
'I do not know that I was any the better,' continued Nadine Napraxine in the same even, dreamy tones. 'But I do not know that I was any the worse. Everything depends on temperament. Oh yes, much more than on circumstance, let them say what they will. Temperament is like climate, a thing unalterable. All the forces of men will not make the Nile desert cold, or the Baltic shores tropical. It is so delightful to think that something escapes the carpentering of man! Do you know, when an earthquake asserts itself or a mountain kills people, I can never help saying to myself with pleasure--"Ah-ha! there is _something_ left, then, that they cannot explain away, or regulate, or measure with their pocket-rule, and what a comfort that is!"'
She laughed a little, leaning back in her chair, slowly moving a fan which Watteau had painted for Larghillière.
'Madame Napraxine,' answered Othmar bitterly, 'has always occupied in life the position which Juvenal thought so enviable; she has always watched the tempest and the shipwreck from her own safe couch behind her casement.'
'Yes, I have,' she murmured, with a little sigh of self-satisfaction. 'It is so easy not to go out in bad weather.'
'Let us leave metaphor,' she continued, after a pause; 'I know you believe in something like the Greek Erinnys; but you may believe me that there is nothing of the kind. We all make our own fates, or our temperaments make them for us. Destiny does not stalk about amongst us unseen, but irresistible, as I know you think it does. I believe there is nothing which befalls us, from a catarrh to a catastrophe, which, if we choose to be honest with ourselves, we may not trace to our own imprudence.'
'Never had a cold? Oh, indeed I have. If you were to listen to de Thiviers, I am a person on whom the most southerly wind should never be allowed to blow, for fear of its blowing through me and annihilating me; as for catastrophe----'