The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

He took her hand with charming courtesy and kissed it.

‘And who can say enough for the position of her husband?’ he asked.

They played a hand or two with the luck fairly divided, and Petros, who seemed to Sophia to have recaptured his skill, was a considerable winner at the end of an hour. But shortly after that he held a hand for which, as Sophia declared, the world was made. He had early in the game declared sequence six times, and then abandoned it; he had three beziques on the table and the fourth knave of diamonds. This card he drew in some eight tricks before the end, and still Sophia had not seen the corresponding queen. But Petros’s heart failed him; he scored the three beziques again with his extra knave, and immediately afterwards drew in the missing queen.

Sophia was aghast.

‘Four thousand five hundred gone to the dogs!’ she exclaimed, with contempt. ‘Really, Petros, you are beside yourself.’

‘It was a fault of generalship, I admit,’ said he.

Sophia looked at him very steadily. This was a good opening for what she had to say.

‘Indeed, Petros, you are no Napoleon,’ she said. ‘You could never, never carve a kingdom for yourself.’

So Petros had his warning, and Sophia hardened her heart against him.

As Malakopf had suggested, the two conspirators saw somewhat less of each other for the next week or two, and more than once Sophia thought—and, to do her justice, hoped—that Petros must have taken her word of warning to heart. But his nauseating little tendernesses and solicitudes for her were not diminished, and she found him infinitely disgusting. He was acting a part, of that she was well assured, for he was not, she knew, a man to whom caresses are habitual, and their day had long since been over between them. What, then, could this recrudescence of an exhibition which had never been natural to him mean but that he wished to keep her ever surrounded with a tinsel counterfeit of love? And for what reason could he coin its tokens in such profusion, except that he wished her to rest assured of his unalterable devotion? The man was putrid.