"I would not advise any one who values sound limbs in his body to presume to look down upon you, Excellency or no Excellency!" cried the Viceroy, wrathfully, menacing his own face with his fists in the glass. "True, this Araktseieff was devoted hand and foot to my father—he followed him about like a dog. Yet, for all that, I'd rather know him to be safe on the island which Kotzebue named after him, in the Yellow Sea, than here."
"Why, dearest?" asked his wife, as she tied and arranged the Grand Duke's necktie.
"Oh, women have nothing to do with state secrets," he answered, as he strove to twirl the ends of his mustache evenly—an attempt in which all his efforts were unavailing, for one side would not keep together. Woe to the private if the Grand Duke's eyes lighted on an ill-waxed mustache! "I only tell you he may esteem himself a lucky man if I have no cane at hand during our interview."
"Oh, don't terrify me, dearest!"
"I was only joking. May I not have my bit of fun? Well, are we ready now? I am hungry. I have been working all the morning like any corporal."
"We will go, then. Won't you choose out one of your sticks?"
In every room of the palace where the Grand Duke went, even in his wife's dressing-room, stood a couple of sticks; and it was as much as any one's life was worth to move them from where he placed them.
"A stick? For what? I am not lame."
"No; but to chastise the culprit, he who ran you into such danger. You might have been killed. He well deserves to be punished."
"Does he, really? Well, then, you choose one. What, this good, stout one? Ah, that won't break so easily. So you feel more for me than for the man who injured me? Come, that is a rare trait in your sex. Women usually expend their sympathy on the guilty. Now, then, let us be off."