Madame threw a glance after the gesture.  The time was so long ago, the mythology of Greece hardly more distant!  At eighty the golden age of youth must indeed appear an evanescent myth.  Madame’s ideas seemed to take that direction.

“Ah, at that time we were all nymphs, and you all demigods.”

“Demigods and nymphs, yes; but there was one among us who was a god with you all.”

The allusion—­a frequent one with Mr. Horace—­was to madame’s husband, who in his day, it is said, had indeed played the god in the little Arcadia of society.  She shrugged her shoulders.  The truth is so little of a compliment The old gentleman sighed in an abstracted way, and madame, although apparently absorbed in her game, lent her ear.  It is safe to say that a woman is never too old to hear a sigh wafted in her direction.

“Josephine, do you remember—­in your memory—­”

She pretended not to hear.  Remember?  Who ever heard of her forgetting?  But she was not the woman to say, at a moment’s notice, what she remembered or what she forgot.

“A woman’s memory!  When I think of a woman’s memory—­in fact, I do not like to think of a woman’s memory.  One can intrude in imagination into many places; but a woman’s memory—­”

Mr. Horace seemed to lose his thread.  It had been said of him in his youth that he wrote poetry—­and it was said against him.  It was evidently such lapses as these that had given rise to the accusation.  And as there was no one less impatient under sentiment or poetry than madame, her feet began to agitate themselves as if Jules were perorating some of his culinary inanities before her.

“And a man’s memory!” totally misunderstanding him.  “It is not there that I either would penetrate, my friend.  A man—­”

When madame began to talk about men she was prompted by imagination just as much as was Mr. Horace when he talked about women.  But what a difference in their sentiments!  And yet he had received so little, and she so much, from the subjects of their inspiration.  But that seems to be the way in life—­or in imagination.

“That you should”—­he paused with the curious shyness of the old before the word “love”—­“that you two should—­marry—­seemed natural, inevitable, at the time.”

Tradition records exactly the same comment by society at the time on the marriage in question.  Society is ever fatalistic in its comments.

“But the natural—­the inevitable—­do we not sometimes, I wonder, perform them as Jules does his accidents?”

“Ah, do not talk about that idiot!  An idiot born and bred!  I won’t have him about me!  He is a monstrosity!  I tell his grandmother that every day when she comes to comb me.  What a farce—­what a ridiculous farce comfortable existence has become with us!  Fresh mushrooms in market, and bring me carrots!”

The old gentleman, partly from long knowledge of her habit, or from an equally persistent bend of his own, quietly held on to his idea.