He was especially
interested by the Countess Sabine. Her name had often been mentioned
in his presence, and he knew that, having been married at the age of
seventeen, she must now be thirty-four and that since her marriage
she had passed a cloistered existence with her husband and her
mother-in-law. In society some spoke of her as a woman of religious
chastity, while others pitied her and recalled to memory her charming
bursts of laughter and the burning glances of her great eyes in the days
prior to her imprisonment in this old town house. Fauchery scrutinized
her and yet hesitated. One of his friends, a captain who had recently
died in Mexico, had, on the very eve of his departure, made him one of
those gross postprandial confessions, of which even the most prudent
among men are occasionally guilty. But of this he only retained a vague
recollection; they had dined not wisely but too well that evening, and
when he saw the countess, in her black dress and with her quiet smile,
seated in that Old World drawing room, he certainly had his doubts. A
lamp which had been placed behind her threw into clear relief her dark,
delicate, plump side face, wherein a certain heaviness in the contours
of the mouth alone indicated a species of imperious sensuality.
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