"Paris?" she added, in that dramatic southern manner of hers, "society?—no, no, my friend, I want nothing of it! Paris society is only the home of petty and despicable people, of petty and despicable emotions—a thing which swings half-way between a modiste's shop and the gallows!"
"And what is Corsica?" laughed her husband.
"Don't you feel it?"—she countered—and then, "Why—it is this, this, this!"
And she pointed from the balcony of the crumbling old castle out to the sea, opaque and green and solid like a metal plaque; at the patches of tufted beach grass that turned from gold to silver as the hot south wind twisted them over, at the sky which was of such an intense blue that at times it quivered with black and purple lights.
Again, at night, when she and the marquis strolled through the tortuous, hilly streets of the village, she asked him to feel Corsica—the heart of it—and she pointed at the bold-eyed young girls, brown like Florentine bronzes, who were walking arm in arm, by threes and fours, with rhythmic, feline movements of their supple hips; at the keen-faced men with their staring eyes and the pose of head and body which spoke of love and hatred and pride—
