‘You know what I mean,’ said her hostess, who always expected to be understood. ‘Our life is silly, it is tiresome, it is entirely selfish, it is even, in a way, monstrous; and yet we cannot live any other. We are dominated by the Frankenstein of pleasure which we have been pleased to create. When we wish to get away we cannot; we are like the queen at the palace windows—we would fain go to the greenwood, and the brook, and the fresh winds, but we cannot, because we are fastened in our gilded chair; there is always our household to shut the window and send the gipsies away. Do we ever get rid of the household, of the galerie, of the routine, of the infinite ennui? I am only twenty-three years old, as you all know, and I feel as if I had lived fifty years. Why? Because it is all over-full, tiresome, high-pressure; and the worst of it is that I could lead no other life if I tried!’
‘I am not sure of that,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Marie Antoinette would never have believed that she could mend clothes and darn stockings had not the days of darkness come. In those days it was just the dainty perfumed mignonnes like you, my dear, who were the bravest and handiest in bearing their troubles and earning their bread.’
‘One never knows till one is tried,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘If they would begin to guillotine us I daresay we should know how to behave; dynamite doesn’t do much for us. When one goes into the air without warning in little bits, in company with the plaster of the ceiling, or the skin of the carriage horses, or the stuffing of the railway carriage, there is not much room for heroism.’
‘I am not sure there is no heroism,’ said Geraldine. ‘The certainty of the guillotine must have been much easier to bear than the uncertainty in which you all dwell in Russia—the perpetual spectre always behind your chairs, beside your pillows, under the roses in your gardens——’
‘Oh, my dear Geraldine, is not death with us always everywhere? May we not kill ourselves every moment we walk downstairs, or eat a mullet like this, or start on a journey, or read a book by a night-lamp? You all wonder how Russians can exist with assassination always keeping step with them, but in reality is it so much worse than the way in which all humanity loves and laughs, and toils and moils, and makes leases for ninety-nine years, and contracts foreign loans for payment in a century, with death hanging over the whole thing ready to swoop down at any minute? If the world realised it of course it would go mad en masse, but it doesn’t realise it though hundreds of people die every second.’
‘Did Nadine ever tell you what she did last year?’ said Prince Napraxine. ‘She saw by chance a queer-looking can which had been placed by some of those miscreants in a niche of the garden wall of our house in Petersburg; the thing looked suspicious to her, and it had a coil of tubing attached to it. She took the whole affair up and dropped it into the fountain. She forgot to mention it till the next morning. Then when we fished it out, and the chemists reported on it, it appeared that the can was really full of nitro-glycerine as she had fancied. I think that was quite as courageous as going to the guillotine.’
‘Oh, no, my dear Platon!’ said his wife, with some annoyance. ‘Nothing you have no time to think about is really courageous. The can was suspicious and the children were playing near it, so I thought the fountain was the safest place; it might have been only milk, you know. Pray do not let us attempt to compete with those people of ‘89. We shall fail dismally.’
Geraldine looked up with a startled apprehension in his eyes.
‘Good heavens, do you mean it? Has she actually been—been—in such awful danger as that, and never told me?’