This girl was very woman to her finger-tips. No intellectual education had trained her in the ways that Rona had gone. She lived in a world of emotions, with no actual knowledge of life.
The dream of her youth had always been to be English. She loved Miss Forester better than anyone else in the world. She absorbed the literature, the customs, of her beloved land. She read English novels, and longed to come in contact with an English gentleman.
It was not surprising that, when she met Denzil, she should idealize him.
In his quiet manner, his pleasant appearance, his outwardly calm bearing, she thought she perceived all the greatness, the depth, of the English character. She saw him through a haze of rosy dreams, just as he saw her in a circle of mystic light. Each was to the other a perfectly new type, with all the fascination of the unknown.
She had fancied herself in love with Felix, and had been thrown back upon herself in much the same manner as Denzil.
The feeling with which she inspired the bewildered young man was entirely mutual. Each to the other was the central figure of a romance in real life.
Everything in the circumstances of their association conspired to make the dream perfect. They were isolated from all the world. Each formed for the other the paramount interest of the moment.
Nadia differed essentially from the girls he knew in England. Her physical beauty appealed to his own thin blood with a force that shook him. The witchery of her voice, the splendor of her eyes, the atmosphere of mystery which seemed to radiate from her, acted like a narcotic upon his enfeebled system. For days past he had lived, steeped in a dream whose awakening he simply refused to picture. Just as Felix and Rona, in the forest, were longing that the journey might never end, so the blameless Denzil, who had lived so many years in the prosaic groove of a country gentleman of quiet habits and few tastes, was positively yearning that he might remain forever, slowly convalescing within the magic walls of that romantic inclosure where the outside world could be so completely forgotten that it might never have existed.
The notion that Miss Rawson and Rona, the two links with his own steady-going everyday life, were traveling to him, and must arrive in two or three days, was a notion which he put from him. He could not—would not think. He was steeped to the lips in a fairy tale, which he would read on to the end. He did not say this, even in his own heart. He was conscious of nothing of the kind. He drifted, like one floating out upon a warm current, carrying him away, whither he neither knew nor cared.
Outside upon the terrace the Governor took his cigar from his mouth, and said to Vronsky, "Your Felix assures me that in England those whom he calls the county gentlefolk are equal in their own eyes with us of the aristocracy in Russia."