It was an early hour in the afternoon. She was received in the vestibule by Hélène, the assistant-procureur’s wife, with an outburst of kisses and caresses which had something to do with the young woman’s expecting to become a mother. Rising in the background was the hostess, Lydia Grigorievna Chertogova (Chertogoff) and her gorgeous crutches. She was large, dark, and in spite of her made-over gowns, imposingly handsome. Aware of the fantastic majesty which these crutches gave her stalwart form, she paraded her defect as she did her beautiful dark eyes. At this moment it seemed as though the high-polished ebony crutches joined her in beaming at the sight of the distinguished visitor. Hélène, a small woman of twenty-four, usually compact as a billiard ball, was beginning to resemble an over-ripe apple.
When the three women found themselves in the drawing room Lydia Grigorievna lost no time in turning the conversation on the arrested Nihilist. Her son-in-law had carefully abstained from opening his mouth on the subject, yet she talked about it authoritatively, with an implication of reserved knowledge of still graver import, but Hélène gave her away.
“Woldemar would not speak about it,” she complained, reverently. “‘An affair of state,’ he said. You can’t get a single word out of him.” She exulted in the part he was playing as an exterminator of the enemies of the Czar, and in the air-castles she was building as to the promotion to which the present case was to pave his way.
“But what do they want, those scamps?” Lydia Grigorievna resumed, in soft, pampered accents. “Would they have us live without a Czar? I should have them cut to pieces, the rogues. Is it possible that the government should be powerless to get rid of them? To think of a handful of striplings keeping cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror.”
“Oh, nobody is really afraid of them,” Hélène retorted, holding her face to the breeze which came in through an open window.
“But your husband is not yet a cabinet minister, dear,” her mother said with a smile toward the countess.
“Oh, you’re always suspecting me of something or other, mamman. I was not thinking of Woldemar at all.”
The charm of her presence, the appealing charm of a pretty young woman about to become a mother, added itself to the tenderness and mystery of spring. Lydia Grigorievna addressed another smile to the countess, but Anna Nicolayevna dropped her glance. The princess went on raging at the revolutionists. In reality, however, that handful of striplings who “kept cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror” had stirred up a curiosity in her that sprang from anything but indignation or contempt. She was hankering for a specimen of their literature, of those publications the very handling of which was apt to bring death. Her thirst in this direction was all the keener because she felt sure that some of the Nihilist papers that had been confiscated at the arrest of the unknown man were upstairs in her son-in-law’s desk.
“A constitution may be all very well in Germany or France,” she said. “This is Russia, not Germany or France or England, thank God. Yet those wretches will go around stirring up discontent. On my way home from Moscow last winter I heard a passenger say that if we had less bribery and more liberty and popular education we would be as good as any nation in Western Europe. I knew at once he was a Nihilist. You can tell one by the first word he utters. I confess I was afraid to sit near him. He had grey side-whiskers, but maybe they were just stuck on. Oh, I should show them no mercy.”