Meanwhile, Stella has vainly tried to become interested in the English novel purchased at Nuremberg; she leaves the lovers, after their twenty-second reconciliation, beneath a blossoming hawthorn, and, closing the book with a slight yawn, sits up and looks about her. At the other end of the room, as far as possible from Stella, sits the pianist, writing a letter: from time to time she looks up to bestow upon Stella a hostile glance. On the other side of the same table two ladies are engaged in partaking of the best supper that the restaurant of the railway-hotel can afford,--a supper with foie gras, mayonnaise of lobster, and a bottle of champagne. One of them, with the figure and face of a Juno, her costly furs falling gracefully from her full shoulders, is so perfumed that even the atmosphere about Stella reeks with peau d'Espagne. Eyebrows, lips--her entire face is painted; and yet she does not look in the least like a travelling prima donna.
"Can that be the Princess Oblonsky?" Stella says to herself, with a start. "No doubt of it: it is."
And there beside the Princess, on Stella's side of the table, but with her back to her,--who is that?
Jack Leskjewitsch always used to declare that Stasy's shoulders were shaped like a champagne-bottle. Stella wonders whether anywhere in the world can be found a pair of more sloping shoulders than those which that fur-trimmed circular fails to conceal. Both ladies devote their entire attention for a time to their supper; at last the Princess pushes away her plate with a certain impatience, and with an odd smile says, "Where did you first know him?"
"Whom?" asks the other.
It is Stasy, of course; there may be another woman in the world with those same sloping shoulders, but there can be none with such a thin, affected voice.
"Why, him, my chevalier sans peur et sans reproche," says the Princess.
"Edgar? Oh, I spent a long time in the same house with him last summer," Stasy declares. "He is still one of the most interesting men I have ever met. Such a profile! such eyes! and so attractive in manner!"
The ladies speak French, the Princess with perfect fluency but a rather hard accent, Stasy somewhat stumblingly.
"Strange!" the Oblonsky murmurs.