I checked myself on the point of replying, pretended to falter, and then muttered in the worst French I could devise on the spur of the moment:
“Parlez-vous Anglais, s’il vous plaît, Madame?”
The Princess shook her head reproachfully.
“You speak French too well not to understand it, I suspect,” she retorted in the same language. Then dropping it for English, marred only by a slight Slavonic accent, she repeated:
“But tell me,—dear Mr. Place, he is a great friend of yours, I suppose?”
“I can hardly claim the honor of his personal friendship,” I replied, rather lamely. “But I have always known and admired him as a public man.”
“Ah! He is so good, is he not? So generous, so confiding, so great a friend of our dear Russia. You know Mr. ——?”
The name she uttered was that of the politician referred to above. She slipped it out swiftly, with the action of a cat pouncing.
I shook my head with an air of distress.