"Was it not? I was a comical-looking thing then, and how badly dressed! Look at those big sleeves and the odd skirt. It was a gown of my elder sister's made over. Good heavens! that gown had a part in my resolve to throw you over. Do you remember?"
"Yes, Lori."
"Only faintly, I think," she laughs. "And yet you seemed to take it sadly to heart then. I was greatly agitated myself. But what else was to be done? I was tired of wearing my sister's old gowns. Youth longs for splendour; it is one of its diseases, and when it has it--pshaw! you need not look so, Lato: I have no intention of throwing myself at your head. I know that old tale is told for both of us. And we never were suited for each other. It was well that I did not marry you, but, good heavens, I might have waited for some one else! It need not have been just that one--that----" with a hasty gesture of disgust she tosses aside a photograph of Count Wodin which she has just drawn from the heap. "What would you have? If a tolerably presentable man appears, and one knows that he can buy one as many gowns, diamonds, and horses as one wants, why, one forgets everything else and accepts him. What ideas of marriage one has at seventeen! And our parents take good care not to enlighten us. 'She will get used to it,' say father and mother, and the mother believes it because she wants to, and both rejoice that their daughter is provided for; and before one is aware the trap has fallen. I bore you, Lato."
"No," he replies; "you grieve me."
"Oh, it is only now and then that I feel thus," she murmurs. "Shall I tell you the cause of my wretched mood?"
"Utter fatigue, the natural consequence of yesterday's pleasures."
"Not at all. I accidentally came upon the picture of my cousin Ada to-day. Do you remember her? There she is." She hands him a photograph. "Exquisitely beautiful, is it not?"
"Yes," he says, looking at the picture; "the eyes are bewitching, and there is such womanly tenderness, such delicate refinement, about the mouth."
"Nothing could surpass Ada," says Countess Lori; "she was a saint, good, self-sacrificing, not a trace in her of frivolity or selfishness."
"And yet she married Hugo Reinsfeld, if I am not mistaken?" says Lato. "I have heard nothing of her lately. News from your world rarely reaches me."