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“Do tell me,” I said, as we stood looking round the house, “who and what is the lady in white, with the young man sitting behind her.”

“Who?” he answered, dropping his glass. “Madame Blumenthal! What! It would take long to say. Be introduced; it’s easily done; you will find her charming. Then, after a week, you will tell me what she is.”

“Perhaps I should not. My friend there has known her a week, and I don’t think he is yet able to give a coherent account of her.”

He raised his glass again, and after looking a while, “I am afraid your friend is a little–what do you call it?–a little ‘soft.’ Poor fellow! he’s not the first. I have never known this lady that she has not had some eligible youth hovering about in some such attitude as that, undergoing the softening process. She looks wonderfully well, from here. It’s extraordinary how those women last!”

“You don’t mean, I take it, when you talk about ‘those women,’ that Madame Blumenthal is not embalmed, for duration, in a certain infusion of respectability?”

“Yes and no. The atmosphere that surrounds her is entirely of her own making. There is no reason in her antecedents that people should drop their voice when they speak of her. But some women are never at their ease till they have given some damnable twist or other to their position before the world. The attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like sitting too straight in a fauteuil. Don’t ask me for opinions, however; content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote. Madame Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born. I remember her mother, an old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the Great’s grenadiers. She was poor, however, and her principles were an insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious Jew, twice her own age. He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young wife spent it very fast. She has been a widow these six or eight years, and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose she is some six or eight and thirty years of age. In winter one hears of her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden. She’s very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her. A year after her marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the George Sand manner–beating the drum to Madame Sand’s trumpet. No doubt she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast. Since then she has published a lot of literature–novels and poems and pamphlets on every conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian philosophy. Her talk is much better than her writing. Her conjugophobia–I can’t call it by any other name–made people think lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against marriage was probably only theoretic. She had a taste for spinning fine phrases, she drove her shuttle, and when she came to the end of her yarn she found that society had turned its back. She tossed her head, declared that at last she could breathe the sacred air of freedom, and formally announced that she had embraced an ‘intellectual’ life. This meant unlimited camaraderie with scribblers and daubers, Hegelian philosophers and Hungarian pianists. But she has been admired also by a great many really clever men; there was a time, in fact, when she turned a head as well set on its shoulders as this one!” And Niedermeyer tapped his forehead. “She has a great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her. Yet for all that, I am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box. I am going to leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe the omission, that I too have gone over to the Philistines. It’s not that; it is that there is something sinister about the woman. I am too old for it to frighten me, but I am good-natured enough for it to pain me. Her quarrel with society has brought her no happiness, and her outward charm is only the mask of a dangerous discontent. Her imagination is lodged where her heart should be! So long as you amuse it, well and good; she’s radiant. But the moment you let it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a pang. If you land on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but there have been two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their necks in the fall.”