And yet, with a curious perversity, she was jealous of the very quality she sneered at--acutely jealous of the mistress who might command, if she liked and as she liked, that dreamer of dreams. She did not understand M. Tiretta’s mystical rhapsodies (she had often, herself unseen or unobserved, heard him improvise), or the fine subtlety of his mind, or the rareness of his gift; she did not admire either his melancholy looks or his serene humour. But an uneasy suspicion as to the superior value of these qualifications, as compared with la Coque’s showy and meretricious ones, haunted her. She felt them like supercilious reflections on her own vulgar taste, or on what they seemed to imply to be such; and the thought, as with common natures, did not drive her to aspire, but to degrade. She had no wish, for herself or her lover, to rise to Tiretta’s level; she would have liked dearly to pull him down to theirs. Wherefore, in the prosecution of that amiable design, she had been quite ready to lend herself a subtle instrument to the ruin of that rival favourite. She would even, if provoked to it, have given her body to the task, as she had her soul. To hate and to seduce, to seduce because she hated, to risk loving because she had seduced--that was something her mental attitude. It was the passionist French view, and Fanchette was excessively French. CHAPTER X. THE ORANGE GROVE All the glowing air was steeped in incense. The mealy pollen of the orange blossoms, washed out by the rain of the preceding days, had dried and scattered its largesse, powdering with gold dust the purple whimples of the violets underneath. The smell of warm moistened grass rose to mix with and to freshen the languider perfume, whose excess had otherwise been cloying. No whisper breathed, no blade stirred in all the lovely grove. It was like a painted picture, each leaf of it, each waxen blossom, each incandescent globe of fruit drawn clear and motionless against its background of vivid blue; and so stilly luminous throughout, that its shadows were but tempered light, embroidered, like rich velvet, with spangles of brighter emerald; while the very prismatic sparkles with which the air was dusted seemed themselves to float asleep. An hour ago a nightingale had sung, sweet as a little bell-glass; since when this hush had fallen on the grove, sunk in warm drowsiness within its encircling green--a quiet so profound, one might have fancied one could distinguish the soft rustle of the cloud-skirts, as now and then they trailed across the sky. A single blossom dropped, and the whole illusion scattered, like a mirrored image in a pool into which an acorn has fallen. On the instant there came into this voiceless paradise the figures of a man and a stunted boy. The man carried a lute or mandolin slung over his shoulder; the boy, large-headed and large-hatted like a gnome, followed importantly in the other’s footsteps.