Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/18

 wipe them away. The melancholy, however, which shadowed her face was not precisely a tragic melancholy. Her emotion, even to an indifferent observer, would have appeared to be petty. It had in it that ephemeral quality which is distinguishable in the eyes of a young girl who has just been refused permission to go out to a party.

What was the Countess thinking of, what souvenirs had disturbed her, to cause her these moments of self-pity? As, it is said, happens to a drowning man, twenty years had rushed pell-mell into her consciousness. In this mental process there was no chronology, no arrangement, even, sometimes, no clarity. She recalled the fields of France, sprinkled with scarlet and saffron poppies and bright blue corn-flowers; an Opéra bal, which she had attended in the guise of Froufrou, obsessed her memory, and she began to hum la Valse des roses; a dinner at Tortoni's with the Duc de Vallombrosa, the Vicomte de Sarcus, Monsieur and Madame de Beschevet; a box of bonbons from Boissier, with an unforgettable card. . . . She remembered how she had met her husband at a Charity Ball in Chicago—how long ago?—twenty or twenty-five years? She could not be certain. Then, a few years later, his sudden death in Venice, his entombment in the mausoleum at Ravenna, the picturesque mourning garments which Worth had created for her. Quite abruptly other pictures displaced these: moments at the Paris Exposition of