All these reports had of course reached Odo; but he still hoped that an appeal to her love of dominion might prove stronger than the habit of self-indulgence.  He said to himself that nothing had ever been done to rouse her ambition, that hitherto, if she had meddled in politics, it had been merely from thwarted vanity or the desire to gratify some personal spite.  Now he hoped to take her by higher passions, and by associating her with his own schemes to utilise her dormant energies.

For the first moments she listened with the strained fixity of a child; then her attention flickered and died out.  The life-long habit of referring every question to a personal standpoint made it difficult for her to follow a general argument, and she leaned back with the resigned eyelids of piety under the pulpit.  Odo, resolved to be patient, and seeing that the subject was too large for her, tried to take it apart, putting it before her bit by bit, and at such an angle that she should catch her own reflection in it.  He thought to take her by the Austrian side, touching on the well-known antagonism between Vienna and Rome, on the reforms of the Tuscan Grand-Duke, on the Emperor Joseph’s open defiance of the Church’s feudal claims.  But she scented a personal application.

“My cousin the Emperor should be a priest himself,” she shrugged, “for he belongs to the preaching order.  He never goes to France but he gives the poor Queen such a scolding that her eyes are red for a week.  Has Joseph been trying to set our house in order?”

Discouraged, but more than ever bent on patience, he tried the chord of vanity, of her love of popularity.  The people called her the beautiful Duchess—­why not let history name her the great?  But the mention of history was unfortunate.  It reminded her of her lesson-books, and of the stupid Greeks and Romans, whose dates she could never recall.  She hoped she should never be anything so dull as an historical personage!  And besides, greatness was for the men—­it was enough for a princess to be virtuous.  And she looked as edifying as her own epitaph.

He caught this up and tried to make her distinguish between the public and the private virtues.  But the word “responsibility” slipped from him and he felt her stiffen.  This was preaching, and she hated preaching even more than history.  Her attention strayed again and he rallied his forces in a last appeal.  But he knew it was a lost battle:  every argument broke against the close front of her indifference.  He was talking a language she had never learned—­it was all as remote from her as Church Latin.  A princess did not need to know Latin.  She let her eye linger suggestively on the clock.  It was a fine hunting morning, and she had meant to kill a stag in the Caccia del Vescovo.

When he began to sum up, and the question narrowed to a direct appeal, her eyes left the clock and returned to him.  Now she was listening.  He pressed on to the matter of retrenchment.  Would she join him, would she help to make the great work possible?  At first she seemed hardly to understand; but as his meaning grew clear to her—­“Is the money no longer ours?” she exclaimed.