"An Italian?" I asked.
"No," he said, "not an Italian. Not a southerner. A northerner. Possibly a Norwegian. A Norwegian or a Dane. That would be just the kind of person to be attracted by this fairy-tale-looking, in reality, prosaic being."
"And who would the original Fairy Prince be?" I asked.
"He would be an ordinary Englishman. Any of the young men I saw here would do for that. The originality of his character would be in this: that he would look and be considered the type of dog-like fidelity and unalterable constancy, and in reality he would forget all about her directly he met someone else he loved. He would have been quite faithful till then. Faithful for two or three years. Then he would have met someone else: a married woman. Someone out of his reach, and he would have been passionately devoted to her and have forgotten all about the Fairy Princess.
"The Norwegian would be attracted by her very apathy and seeming coldness and aloofness. He would imagine that this would all melt and vanish away at the first kiss. That she would come to life like Galatea. It would be the opposite of Galatea. The first kiss would turn her to stone once more.
"Then being a very nice honest fellow he would be miserable. He would not know what to do. He would be a sailor perhaps, and be called away. That would have to be thought about."
Then we talked of other things. I asked Rudd if he had made Kranitski's acquaintance. He said, Yes, he had. He was quite a pleasant fellow, no brains and very commonplace and rather reactionary in his ideas; not politically, he meant, but intellectually.
He had not got further than Miss Austen and he was taken in by Chesterton. All that was very crude. But he was amiable and good-natured.
I said Princess Kouragine liked him.
"Ah," he said, "that is an interesting type. The French character infected by the Slav microbe.