with
teeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full of
homely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow worked
into her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literature
of traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full of
the wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines to serve with the
dinner. Blasius' monastery had been famous for good living.

That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of the
house enslaved Bouchalka. "Imagine it," he once said to me when I dropped
in during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. "To
be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had
weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once,
like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People have
terrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night so
warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my
light. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there."

I began to think that Bouchalka's wildness had been the desperation which
the tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized.
Naturally luxurious, he had suffered more than most men under the pinch
of penury. Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music of
his own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness and
heart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of
hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his
despair. Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though his
gratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting task-master.
She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one who
had accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany her
upon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because travelling interfered
with composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius,
or Bla[vz]ej, as his wife had with difficulty learned to call him, was
not showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, even the best of them.
Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and the
humour of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire. I
believe she would have preferred even enthusiasm about other women to his
utter _oisivete_. It was his old fire, not his docility, that had won
her.

During the third season after her m