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He could, if he wished, give her a million extraordinary glimpses of the earth and the air and the waters below them, for his eyes were mirrors of his marvellous and many-coloured soul; but what chance had he with a conjugal iceberg on one side, a cloud of smoke poor Aunt Sheldam on the other!
And what colouring, what gorgeous brown hair! What a race, madame, is yours!" Mrs. Sheldam began to explain that the Adams stock was famous, but the marquis did not heed her. He peered at her niece through a gold-rimmed monocle. The princess had left the group near the table and with two young men slowly moved down the salon.
Ermentrude threw herself on the couch, her cheeks burning, her heart tugging in her bosom like a ship impatient at its anchorage. And was this the sordid end of a beautiful dream?... "Do you know, dearest, we have had such news!" exclaimed Mrs. Sheldam as she entered, and so charged with her happiness that she did not notice the drawn features of her niece.
Sheldam aroused her husband as she cast a horrified glance at the classic prints he had been studying. The princess dismissed her two impressionists and came over to the poet. She, too plainly, did not care for his wife, and as the party broke up there was a sense of relief, though Ermentrude could not conceal her dissatisfaction.
The grating of the carriage wheels awoke her from the dream which had lightly brushed away the night and the vision of the Arc de Triomphe looming into the mystery of sky and stars, its monumental flanks sprawling across the Place de l'Étoile. She heard her name called by Mrs. Sheldam as their coachman guided his horses through the gateway of the Princesse de Lancovani's palace. "Now, Ermentrude!
"You are a darling!" she answered, as she squeezed Ermentrude's arm. "But there is some one who doesn't seem to care much for Havre." She pointed out Mr. Sheldam, who, oblivious of picturesque Normandy through which the train was speeding, slept serenely. Ermentrude envied him his repose. He had never stared into the maddening mirror which turned poets into Supermen and sometimes monsters.
"Yes, but his princess holds one for him!" was the jesting reply. The carriage door slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Kéroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights of the Rue de Rivoli. "I think your poet a bore," she essayed.
Sheldam, whose tired New England face almost beamed at the compliment. "We were in Hamburg at the Zoölogical Garden; I always go to see animals," declaimed the princess, in the midst of a thick silence. "For you know, my friends, one studies humanity there in the raw. Well, I dragged our party to the large monkey cage, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely! And what do you think we saw!
"Hush, hush!" came in energetic sibilants from the princess, who rapped with her Japanese walking-stick for silence. Mr. Sheldam woke up and fumbled the pictures as Rajewski, slowly bending his gold-dust aureole until it almost grazed the keyboard, began with deliberate accents a nocturne.
The conversation did not move more briskly with the entrance of the Kéroulans. The marquis sullenly gossiped with Mr. Sheldam; the princess withdrew herself to the far end of the room with her two painters. Rajewski was going to a soirée, he informed them, where he would play before a new picture by Carrière, as it was slowly undraped; no one less in rank than a duchess would be present!
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