The Princess seemed plunged in meditation. At length she looked up——
“You would undertake a hopeless task, my dear Andreas. Not even you can fathom all the ramifications of the intrigues in which I find myself an indispensable puppet. Those who control my movements will never let go the strings by which they hold me, and least of all, just now.”
I was distressed to see that the Princess was disposed to evade my appeal for confidence. I answered with a slightly wounded air:
“I may know more than you think, more even than you know yourself on certain points. But of course you are not willing to confide in me fully——”
“There can be no perfect trust without perfect”—The Princess, who spoke this sentence in Russian, concluded it with a word which may mean either friendship or love according to circumstances. As she pronounced it, it seemed like love.
“There can be no perfect love without perfect trust,” I responded quickly, striving to assume the manner of an exacting lover.
And then, a happy thought striking me, I added in an aggrieved voice,
“Do you think it is nothing to me that you should be associated with other men in the most secret enterprises, holding private conferences with them, receiving them in your house, perhaps visiting them in theirs; that you should appear to be on intimate terms with the Grand Duke Staniolanus, with M. Petrovitch, with a man like this M. Auguste——”
At the sound of this last name, to which I had artfully led up, Sophia sprang into a sitting posture and gave me a look of anger and fear.