One evening, she arrived late.  She was exasperated:  Antonino had imbibed his master’s imperturbability and seemed to meet her advances with rebuking chilliness.  A marked gravity governed them both of late; they shut themselves up for hours in their study, but instead of the silence becoming artists, noises of hammering and filing metal sounded, and the chimney belched black smoke of which the neighbors would have had reason to complain.

“A fresh craze!” thought Cesarine, dismissing curiosity from her mind.

Dull and decorous though the marchioness’ salon was, it might be an ante-chamber to a more brilliant resort beyond, while the laboratory of science leads to no place where a pretty woman cares to be.

The Marchioness had remembered her meeting with Cesarine at Munich and was polite enough to express her regret that her offer of a companionship had not been accepted.  “All her pets had married well,” she observed, as much as to say that she would have found no difficulty in paving the lovely one with a superior to Clemenceau.

Soon Madame Clemenceau had become the favorite at the chateau; and, tardy as she was, the servant hastened to usher her in to her reserved chair.  It was placed in the row of honor in the large, lofty drawing-room, hung with tapestry and damask curtains, and filled with funereally garbed men and powdered old dowagers.  The late comer was struck by their eyes being directed with unusual interest upon a vocalist.  He stood before the kind of throne on which the marchioness conceitedly installed herself.

He was singing in German, and he accompanied himself on a zither.  He had an excellent baritone voice, and the ballad, simple and unfinished, became a tragic scena from his skill in repeating some exceptionally talented teacher’s instructions.

To Cesarine, the strains awakened dormant meditations; aspirations frozen in her placid home, began to melt; a curtain was gradually drawn aside to reveal a world where woman reigned over all.  What she had heard from her grandmother of the magic splendor which Wanda had missed and Iza enjoyed, flashed up before her, and her heart warmed delightedly in the voluptuous intoxication of unspeakable bliss.  On the wings of this melody, which, in truth, merely sought to picture the celestial dwelling of the elect, she was carried into one of those bijou palaces of the best part of the Queen City of the Universe, where the bedizened Imperia at the plate-glass window reviews an army of faultlessly-clad gentlemen filing before her, and sweetly calls out: 

“This, gentlemen, is the spot where you can be amused!”

Yes, Cesarine was intended to entertain men!  She longed to be the central figure in the scene, however brief, of that apotheosis where Cupid is proclaimed superior to all the high interests of human conscience; this glittering stage sufficed for her, although it would have limited Felix’s ideal of man’s function.