"Gritzko!" they called in chorus. "Can anyone invent such impossible stories as you!"
"I assure you I am speaking the truth. Is it not so, Madame?" And he looked at Tamara and smiled with fleeting merry mockery in his eyes. "See," and he again turned to his guests, "Madame has been in Egypt she tells me, and should be able to vouch for my truth."
Tamara pulled herself together.
"I think the Sphinx must have cast a spell over you, Prince," she said, "so that you could not distinguish the real from the false. I saw no women who were mummies and then turned into ice!"
Some one distracted Princess Sonia's attention for a moment, and the
Prince whispered, "One can melt ice!"
"To find a mummy?" Tamara asked with grave innocence. "That would be the inverse rotation."
"And lastly a woman—in one's arms," the Prince said.
Tamara turned to her neighbor and became engrossed in his conversation for the rest of the repast.
All the women, and nearly all the men, spoke English perfectly, and their good manners were such that even this large party talked in the strange guest's language among themselves.
"One must converse now as long as one can," her neighbor told her, "because the moment we have had coffee everyone will play bridge, and no further sense will be got out of them. We are a little behind the rest of the world always in Petersburg, and while in England and Paris this game has had its day, here we are still in its claws to a point of madness, as Madame will see."