"Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. That is nothing uncommon."
"Well, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, and who would atone for it would you allow him."
"Atone! Do you suppose that you owe me reparation? It is I who owe you thanks for a momentary oblivion which did me immeasurable service."
"That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess Xenia whom I knew was neither so stern nor so sceptical."
"The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake her."
Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room.
Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation with Nina Curzon.
"Why did you pretend not to know her?" says Mrs. Curzon to him.
He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what he would be thought a brute to put into words.
"She does not deign to know me—now," he says, modestly, and to the experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest, tell her as much as the loudest boast could do.