"Next summer I shall be twenty-five years old," she said to herself, "and the whole thing has been a waste."
Each time the energetic promenaders passed her chair she heard a few words of their conversation, on hunting often, and the dogs, and the children, Bertie's cleverness, and Muriel's chickenpox, but always the Prince seemed interested and polite.
Presently the old man, Stephen Strong, came up and took Mrs.
Hardcastle's chair.
"May I disturb your meditations?" he said. "You look so wise."
"No, I am foolish," Tamara answered. "Now you who know the world must come and talk and teach me its meaning."
He was rather a wonderful old man, Stephen Strong, purely English to look at, and purely cosmopolitan in habits and life. He had been in the diplomatic service years ago, and had been in Egypt in the gorgeous Ismail time; then a fortune came his way, and he traveled the earth over. There were years spent in Vienna and Petersburg and Paris, and always the early winter back in the land of the Sphinx.
"The world," he said, as he arranged himself in the chair, "is an extremely pleasant place if one takes it as it is, and does not quarrel with it. One must not be intolerant, and one must not be hypercritical. See it all and make allowances for the weakness of the human beings who inhabit it."
"Yes," said Tamara, "I know you are right; but so many of us belong to a tribe who think their point of view the only one. I do, for instance; that is why I say I am foolish."
The walkers passed again.
"There is a type for you to study," Stephen Strong said. "Prince Milaslávski. I have known him for many years, since he was a child almost; he is about twenty-nine or thirty now, and really a rather interesting personality."