“Why do you laugh? Can’t you see that I’m a refugee; by my clothes, I mean? Who has such pearls but Russian refugees? Or such sables? We have to have them—to sell, of course! You don’t care to buy my sables, do you? For you they would be only six thousand pounds cash. No, I thought not. It’s my duty to ask—but I didn’t suppose they would interest you. The Paris and London jewellers farm out the pearls to us; the big dressmakers supply the furs. For of course we’ve all sold the originals long ago. And really I’ve been rather successful. I placed two sets of silver fox and a rope of pearls last week at Monte Carlo. Ah, that fatal place! I gambled away the whole of my commission the same night.... But I’m forgetting to tell you how you’ve already helped me....”
She paused to draw breath, and in the pause the Professor, who had kept his hand on his loosened ear-pad, slipped it back over his ear.
“I wear these,” he said coldly, “to avoid argument.”
With a flick she had it off again. “I wasn’t going to argue—I was only going to thank you.”
“I can’t conceive for what. In any case, I don’t want to be thanked.”
Her brows gathered resentfully. “Why did you ask to be, then?” she snapped; and opening a bejewelled wrist-bag she drew forth from a smother of cigarette papers and pawn-tickets a slip of paper on which her astonished companion read a phrase written in a pointed feminine hand, but signed with his own name.
“There!”
The Professor took the paper and scanned it indignantly. “This copy of ‘The Elimination of Phenomena’ was presented by Professor Loring G. Hibbart of Purewater University, Clio, N. Y., to the library of the American Y. M. C. A. Refugee Centre at Odessa.
“A word of appreciation, sent by any reader to the above address, would greatly gratify Loring G. Hibbart.”
“There!” she repeated. “Why did you ask to be thanked if you didn’t want to be? What else does ‘greatly gratify’ mean? I couldn’t write to you from Odessa because I hadn’t the money to buy a stamp; but I’ve longed ever since to tell you what your book did for me. It simply changed my whole life—books do sometimes, you know. I saw everything differently—even our Refugee Centre! I decided at once to give up my lover and divorce my husband. Those were my two first Eliminations.” She smiled retrospectively. “But you mustn’t think I’m a frivolous person. I have my degree as a Doctor of Philosophy—I took it at sixteen, at the University of Moscow. I gave up philosophy the year after for sculpture; the next year I gave up sculpture for mathematics and love. For a year I loved. After that I married Prince Balalatinsky. He was my cousin, and enormously wealthy. I need not have divorced him, as it turned out, for he was soon afterward buried alive by the Bolsheviks. But how could I have foreseen it? And your book had made me feel—”