"You in England have many outlets for your supervitality—you cannot judge of other nations who have not. You had a magnificent system of government. It took you about eight hundred years to build up, and it was the admiration of the world—and now you are allowing your Socialists and ignorant plebeian place hunters to pull it all to pieces and throw it away. That is more foolish surely, than even to go crazy over bridge!"
Tamara sighed.
"Have you ever been in England, Prince?" she asked.
He sat down on the sofa beside her.
"No—but one day I shall go, Paris is as far as I have got on the road as yet."
"You would think us all very dull, I expect, and calculating and restrained," Tamara said softly. "You might like the hunting, but somehow I do not see you in the picture there—"
He got up and moved restlessly to the mantelpiece, where he leaned, while he stirred his tea absently. There was almost an air of bravado in the insouciant tone of his next remark—
"Do you know, I did a dreadful thing," he said. "And it has grieved me terribly, and I must have your sympathy. I hurt my Arab horse. You remember him, Suliman, at the Sphinx?"
"Yes," said Tamara.
"I had a little party to some of my friends, and we were rather gay—not a party you would have approved of, but one which pleased us all the same—and they dared me to ride Suliman from the stables to the big saloon."