'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell and Sir John Suckling's verses.'
'Precisely: so we came to no decision. We have all too much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melancholy. I do not know why; unless it come from the conviction of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not absurd.'
'A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectable in tradition are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose Romeo had been happy; or Stradella; what do you think the poets could have made of them? Love must end somehow: if it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like Cæsar's.'
'But why need it end? You, at least, have seen that through all disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who had cited the love of d'Aubiac for Marguerite.
She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
'Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its perihelion, increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, little by little, the glory departs, the sovereign of the skies grows less and less, until at last there is no more sign of it anywhere, and all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone; it has only gone--elsewhere.'
Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melancholy which it would otherwise have possessed.
'My wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar.
She looked at him with her mysterious smile:
'I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the kindness of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing themselves. What a pity you did not come home a little sooner. You would have been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists headed by Béthune. He was eloquent, but his cause was weak.'
'My cause was strong,' said the Duc de Béthune; 'it was my tongue which lacked persuasiveness.'
'No, you were very poetical; you were only not convincing. My dear friend, we are too scientific in these days for sentiment to have any abiding place in us; we are pessimists, it is true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such discussions as this which we have tried to revive; we are only bored. We do not take our fooling joyously or our sorrows deeply. We are uneasily conscious that we are childish and unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency to end everything with a laugh _en gouailleur_, yet with tears in our eyes. We are always ridiculing ourselves, yet we are always vexed that, ridiculous as we are, we must still die.'