She hugged him. "Why, you old goose! you're always giving me beautiful things. My pretty engagement-ring, and the house, and the new Lizzie, and—You see Stefan doesn't have to provide me with dresses and three meals a day, and put up with all my whims and megrims."
"I'll bet he wishes he did!" exclaimed Archie, with one of his occasional flashes of insight.
She pulled his ears. "You think because you're in love with me yourself that everybody else is, too! Stefan's about as much in love with me as he was with—baby Joan. It's simply gratitude. Mother was very sweet to him always—I've heard her say that it had been her job, and not an easy one, to restore his faith in women. It seems that he was engaged once to marry a girl who quite understood about his Jewish blood. But when he took her down to the East Side in New York to see the old aunt who had brought him to America, she couldn't stand it. She broke with him, not because of any difference in religion, but because the aunt spoke Yiddish and wore a horsehair wig!—Mustn't she feel like a fool, now that he's become so famous?"
"Well, I don't know," said Archie doubtfully. "I'd kind of hate to have Yiddish and a wig in the family myself."
She looked at him in surprise. "Archie! I didn't know you were such a snob! So long as Stefan doesn't wear a wig or speak Yiddish, what does the aunt matter! And the funny part of it was that the aunt rather looked down upon poor Stefan because his father had married a Gentile! So he came to regard mother and me as his only family.... Now run along to bed." She kissed him on his eyes, a caress that Archie loved. "I'm going to take a dose of valerian and have a good night's sleep. It is exciting having your best friend drop down on you from who knows where!"
CHAPTER XLVIII
It proved exciting not only to Joan. Some years earlier the arrival of so distinguished a visitor unadvertised and unpressagented would have caused little more than a ripple, except perhaps among what Joan called the Intelligentzia. But now that belles lettres were coming quite into fashion, the chance of knowing personally a friend of Tolstoi and Maeterlinck, whose articles appeared in all the more intellectual magazines, whose recent book of plays had been published simultaneously in five languages and censored off the American stage into every up-to-date home in the land, was one that could not be ignored.
The Russian servant, too, was a picturesque addition; a great, bearded fellow with eyes like a child, a tall sheepskin papacha on his head, and his trousers tucked into wrinkled boots. This exotic apparition frequently opened the Blair door to visitors, and even waited on them at table, Sacha having without the aid of language won his way somehow to the rather uncertain heart of Ellen Neal; possibly because of his infantile appetite for sweets. He followed his master about like a dog, and whenever Nikolai was in the front of the house, Sacha's broken English and sudden high laugh were frequently to be heard from the rear. There were a good many callers at the Blair house in those days.
The Blairs, and incidentally their friend, also found themselves deluged with invitations, many of which Joan accepted. She rather enjoyed showing off her lion, whose simple dignity was quite impervious to lionizing. His social successes amused her by their unexpectedness; for Nikolai had no small talk and pretended to none. He paid his chance companions the compliment of believing them to be interested in whatever interested him; and very often they were.