not like the Baron.
Behind his impudent servility, behind the devotion which, with
indelicate delicacy, he still forced on her attention, she divined the
grossness of his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear,
and yet sicken at his captive's odour. And above all, she had certain
jealous intimations that the man was false and the deception double.
True, she falsely trifled with his love; but he, perhaps, was only
trifling with her vanity. The insolence of his late mimicry, and the
odium of her own position as she sat and watched it, lay besides like a
load upon her conscience. She met Otto almost with a sense of guilt, and
yet she welcomed him as a deliverer from ugly things.

But the wheels of an interview are at the mercy of a thousand ruts; and
even at Otto's entrance, the first jolt occurred. Gondremark, he saw,
was gone; but there was the chair drawn close for consultation; and it
pained him not only that this man had been received, but that he should
depart with such an air of secrecy. Struggling with this twinge, it was
somewhat sharply that he dismissed the attendant who had brought him
in.

"You make yourself at home, _chez moi_," she said, a little ruffled both
by his tone of command and by the glance he had thrown upon the chair.

"Madam," replied Otto, "I am here so seldom that I have almost the
rights of a stranger."

"You choose your own associates, Frederic," she said.

"I am here to speak of it," he returned. "It is now four years since we
were married; and these four years, Seraphina, have not perhaps been
happy either for you or for me. I am well aware I was unsuitable to be
your husband. I was not young, I had no ambition, I was a trifler; and
you despised me, I dare not say unjustly. But to do justice on both
sides, you must bear in mind how I have acted. When I found it amused
you to play the part of Princess on this little stage, did I not
immediately resign to you my box of toys, this Gruenewald? And when I
found I was distasteful as a husband, could any husband have been less
intrusive? You will tell me that I have no feelings, no preference, and
thus no credit; that I go before the wind; that all this was in my
character. And indeed, one thing is true,--that it is easy, too easy, to
leave things undone. But, Seraphina, I begin to learn it is not always
wise. If I were too old and too uncongenial for your husband, I should
still have remembered that I was the Prince of that cou