“What is it that you think you will see in Russia?” she asked. “I tell you, nothing! You will never see the Russian soul. You will stay there a year, five years, ten years, and never will you know a single Russian. No; we do not wear our hearts on our sleeves. Shall I tell you something of us?”
“Yes, please do!” he said earnestly.
She began to tell him of Petrograd—of shops there, more elegant, she said, than anything to be found in Paris. She described a certain confectioner’s shop. When you went in, you were invited to sample all the sweets displayed there, and there were hundreds of different sorts—hundreds, she assured him! She described forty to him, lingering in ecstasy over their perfections.
She told him of the houses, warm, full of flowers, in the bitterest winter weather; and the women—the kindest women in all the world. She talked of the court, but only briefly. She began to speak of the Czarina, but she could not go on. The words strangled her.
“And all that is gone!” she said. “All that—my God!”
He carefully concealed his American disapproval of courts and sovereigns. He even felt sorry, on her account, that it had gone.
“I do not think that you know in this country what social life is,” she said. “Here it is so formal, so without heart. With us, it is so different. It may be that on a certain day I am tired, ill, lazy. I do not wish to dress. I am in negligee. My friends come, and I receive them just in this fashion. No one is surprised.
“‘For God’s sake, do not apologize, Anastasie!’ they say. ‘It is you we come to see, not your fine clothes!’”
And here the bell rang again, unmistakably for the lesson’s end. Again she was surprised.
“Ah!” she said. “It has been very pleasant for me to talk to you! You are of a sympathetic nature, there is no doubt of that!”