Etta smiled, a little wearily.
“One never knows,” she answered, forcing herself to be light, “what one may come to in old age. I saw a gray hair this morning. I am nearly thirty-three, you know. When glamour goes, nerves come.”
“Well, I suppose they do—especially in Russia, perhaps. There is a glamour about Russia, and I mean to cultivate it rather than nerves. There is a glamour about every thing—the broad streets, the Neva, the snow, and the cold. Especially the people. It is always especially the people, is it not?”
“It is the people, my dear young lady, that lend interest to the world.”
“Paul took me out in a sleigh this morning,” went on Maggie, in her cheerful voice that knew no harm. “I liked every thing—the policemen in their little boxes at the street corners, the officers in their fur coats, the cabmen, every-body. There is something so mysterious about them all. One can easily make up stories about every-body one meets in Petersburg. It is so easy to think that they are not what they seem. Paul, Etta, even you, Herr Steinmetz, may not be what you seem.”
“Yes, that is so,” answered Steinmetz, with a laugh.
“You may be a Nihilist,” pursued Maggie. “You may have bombs concealed up your sleeves; you may exchange mysterious passwords with people in the streets; you may be much less innocent than you appear.”
“All that may be so,” he admitted.
“You may have a revolver in the pocket of your dress-coat,” went on Maggie, pointing to the voluminous garment with her fan.
His hand went to the pocket in question, and produced exactly what she had suggested. He held out his hand with a small silver-mounted revolver lying in the palm of it.