I went to Sabran's dinner. There were several people there. I had never met Countess Yaskov before. She seemed to be a very pleasant and agreeable lady. I sat next to her. She was an accomplished musician, and she played the pianoforte after dinner with a ravishing touch. She was certainly gentle, intelligent, and natural. We were talking of Italy, when she astonished me by saying she had not been there for some time. Later on she astonished me still more by talking of her husband in the most natural way in the world. But I had heard cases of Russians being divorced and yet continuing to be good friends. I longed to ask her if she knew Kranitski, but I could not bring his name across my lips. I asked her if she knew Princess Kouragine. She said, "Which one?" And when I explained or tried to describe the one I knew, there turned out to be about a dozen Princess Kouragines scattered all over Europe; some of them Russian and some of them not, so we did not get any further, and Countess Yaskov was vagueness itself.
We talked of every conceivable subject. As she was going away she asked Sabran if he could lend her a book. He lent her Rudd's Unfinished Dramas, and asked me if he might lend her Overlooked. I said certainly, but I explained that it was more or less a private book about real people.
Two or three days later I met her in the park. She asked me if I had read Rudd's story. I told her it had been read to me.
"But it is meant to happen here, isn't it?" she said. "And aren't you one of the characters?"
I said this was, I believed, the case.
"Then you were here when all that happened?" she said. "Did it happen like that, or was it all an invention?"
I said I thought there was some basis of fact in the story, and a great deal of fancy, but I really didn't know. I did not wish to let her know at once how much I knew.
"Novelists," I said, "invent a great deal on a very slender basis, especially James Rudd."
"You know him?" she said. "He was here with you, of course?"
I told her I had made his acquaintance here, but that I had never seen him before or since.