"Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the subject.
"Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza."
"You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about foreigners."
"How absurd you are, and how insular!" cries Dorothy Usk, again. "'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when Europe is like one family!"
"A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty often, then," says Usk,—which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and alliance, are wholly irreproachable,—indeed, written in that libro d'oro, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.
Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, but her character?—he is too old-fashioned a Briton not to think it very probable that there is something louche there.
Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. He has a rooted impression that all Russians are spies when they are not swindlers; much as in the early years of the century his grandsire had been positive that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not dancing-masters. The White Czar has replaced the Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the cocked hat, in the eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of dread and detestation. He would never be in the least surprised if it turned out that the real object of Madame Sabaroff's visit to Surrenden were to have possible opportunities to examine the facilities of Weymouth as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite corvettes.
"Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, with much contempt, "gammon you no end if you like to believe 'em: they've always some political dodge or other behind it all."
"I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he continues, now: his admiration of Madame Sabaroff is much mitigated by his sense that she has a rather derisive opinion of himself. "I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman, but she gives me the idea of artificiality,—insincerity,—mystery."
"Just because she's a Russian!" cries his wife, with disdain.