“My late husband always grieved over this, that he had no son. That is, there was a son, but he came halfway too early” (here tears quivered in the voice of Pani Bronich). “We kept him some time in spirits. And, if you will believe it, when there was fair weather he rose, and when there was rain he sank down. Ah, what a gloomy remembrance! How much my husband suffered because he was to die,—the last of the Rur—. But a truce to this; ’t is enough that at last he was as attached to Lineta as to a relative,—and surely she was his nearest relative,—and what remains after us will be hers. Maybe for that reason people surround her so. Though—no! I do not wonder at them. If you knew what a torment that is to her, and to me. Two years ago, in Nice, a Portuguese, Count Jao Colimaçao, a relative of the Alcantaras, so lost his head as to rouse people’s laughter. Or that Greek of last year, in Ostend!—the son of a banker, from Marseilles, a millionnaire. What was his name? Lineta, what was the name of that Greek millionnaire, that one who, thou knowest?”
“Aunt!” said Lineta, with evident displeasure.
But the aunt was in full career already, like a train with full steam.
“Ah, ha! I recollect,” said she,—“Kanafaropulos, Secretary of the French Embassy in Brussels.”
Lineta rose and went to Pani Aneta, who was talking at the principal table with Plavitski. The aunt, following her with her eyes, said,—
“The child is angry. She hates tremendously to have any one speak of her successes; but I cannot resist. Do you understand me? See how tall she is! How splendidly she has grown! Anetka calls her sometimes the column, and sometimes the poplar; and really, she is a poplar. What wonder that people’s eyes gaze at her! I haven’t mentioned yet Pan Ufinski. That’s our great friend. My late husband loved him immensely. But you must have heard of Pan Ufinski? That man who cuts silhouettes out of paper. The whole world knows him. I don’t know at how many courts he has cut silhouettes; the last time he cut out the Prince of Wales. There was also a Hungarian.”
Osnovski, who sat near by amusing himself with a pencil at his watch-chain, now drawing it out, now pushing it back, grew impatient at last, and said,—
“A couple of more such, dear aunt, and there would be a masquerade ball.”
“Precisely, precisely!” answered Pani Bronich. “If I mention them, it is because Lineta doesn’t wish to hear of any one. She is such a chauviniste! You have no idea what a chauviniste that child is.”
“God give her health!” said Pan Ignas.