Salvières reflected before replying. “I dare say! And whether she would get along with Tatiana—that’s the question!” He knocked the ashes out of his cold pipe, and thoughtfully replaced this object of his affections in its chamois-lined étui. “I bought this delightful article on the Jarozolimskà in Warsaw,” he casually remarked, “where it is claimed that the shops are better than in Paris. Lord! Moreover, the man who sold it to me said, with a lugubrious grin on his foolish Teutonic face, that this was the finest pipe ever made; and he was right, curiously enough, for I never had a better one. However, to return to our muttons, or rather to our lambkins: I’m afraid, Basil, that perhaps you are by way of building molehills into very tall mountains. You would scarcely have enjoyed a strong-minded, assertive wife—a leader at home and afield, violently interested in politics of every caliber, a platform orator, bowing from the waist up to admiring multitudes—i. e., the sort that so many unfortunate husbands are trying to get used to nowadays.”
Basil could not restrain a laugh. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I do not ask so much. You know very well that I consider men who help women to make fools of themselves unmanly crawlers. But between that and complete indifference to the masses—since you force me to adopt that jargon—there is a yawning gulf.”
“I dare say,” Salvières was beginning, when Countess Chouróff’s deep bass made itself heard at the door, and that lady, followed by four yards of purple-velvet draperies, advanced into the room and faced the two absconders.
“I have lived for years,” she exclaimed, “under the impression that I saw in you gentlemen an overworked Russian proprietor and a French Seigneur, overworked also, but in wifely interests. I apologize for my mistake; you are merely a couple of idlers, confirmed in that same lamentable sloth that enables men of the south to do nothing, very gracefully, for long hours at a time.”
“What procures us this withering indictment?” Salvières protested, laughing. “Remember, dear lady, that it is months—months since the rights of brotherhood have been exercised between Basil and myself! Would you proscribe them beneath your hospitable roof?”
“And what about the rights of my guests to the companionship of the two most important and—let me add—the two most agreeable personalities beneath the roof you invoke?” she replied, with spirit. “Give me your arm, Salvières; and as to you, Basil-Vassilièvitch, seek the protection of your own wife from the ides of my wrath. She is looking for you, anyhow,” she concluded, returning to a simpler form of address.
“Salvières,” she ruefully whispered in the ducal ear almost on a level with her mouth—for she was a remarkably tall woman—“that young and strangely disquieting couple need watching, or we will see them upset by the roadside.”
Salvières started a little and stared surprisedly at her.
“What makes you think that?” he asked, irritably, for his nerves were beginning to be jangled.
“Intuition, assisted by clear sight and miles of experience,” she said, gravely. “That sweet girl in there,” and she pointed to the buzzing drawing-room—which she often playfully alluded to as the sala-del-trono, because it was only thrown open on solemn occasions—“has been purposely created to cause the downfall of great and good men. Remember what I say. Some day, perhaps not so very distant, you’ll find that I’m no idle prophet.”