“You take a deep concern in my movements.”
“I feel a deep interest in all that affects you. But you know that. Besides, it is my business to learn things. We have many agents, and Belgrade is only a small place.”
“Agents?” I said hastily.
“Agents or spies. I will call them spies, if you prefer. The point is that we have them—everywhere. I am one if you like. They form one of the main institutions of government in the Balkans. And in the Servian army they abound in all ranks and all regiments.”
“Whatever I have thought of you I have never pictured you as a Russian spy.”
She bit her lip and clenched her hands and her cheek flushed.
“It is very easy for a millionaire to sneer,” she retorted, speaking deliberately; then with rising passion, she continued: “What would you have had me do? God knows I had little enough choice. I was an adventuress, living on my wits; a cheat if you will to keep my mother and myself from the gutter. Then I was detected; and wherever I looked, the finger of contempt met me. What chance had I? I took the only thing that offered—a husband; my looks, as I thought, gave me that; and I found him—what? A Russian spy. But it was not my looks he sought but my brains, my courage, my recklessness. I could do the work, and do it well; and when he died I was in too deeply to withdraw.”
She paused and her bosom laboured with her vehemence.
“No, I won’t pretend—to you. I could have withdrawn, of course, had I wished. But I did not, for it gave me not only all that a woman is supposed to care for, dress, money, and influence; but also what a woman is not supposed to crave—power. I was feared; and it is by fear I stand where I do. I could have married again, not once but a dozen times; I have been wooed until men cried that I was ice. And to them I was. What were men or marriage to me? I had tried marriage; and as for my heart, it lay in my breast like a dead thing—for the sake of the past.”
She looked searchingly at me as I made no reply.