'Then you shall not be tried by one; we will go elsewhere,' said Wanda, to whom the ice-bound world, the absolute silence, the sense of the sleigh flying over the hard snow, the perfect purity of the rarefied air of night and day, made up the most welcome season of the year.
'I suppose it is dull for you,' she added, indulgently. 'I have so many occupations in the winter; a pair of skates and a sleigh are to me of all forms of motion the most delightful. But you, shut up in your blue-room, do no doubt find our winter hard and long.'
'I hybernate, I do not live,' said the Princess, pettishly. 'It is not even as if the house were full.'
'With ill-assorted guests whose cumbersome weariness one would have to try all day long to dissipate! Oh, my dear aunt, of all wearisome corvées the world holds there is nothing so bad as a house party—even when Egon is here to lead the cotillion and the hunting.'
'You are very inhospitable!'
'That is the third time lately you have made that charge against me. I begin to fear that I must deserve it.'
'You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you are hospitable to the poor. You set pedlars, or mule-drivers, or travelling clockmakers, by the dozen round your hall fires, and you would feed a pilgrimage all the winter long. But to your own order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In your mother's time the Schloss had two hundred guests for the autumn parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to Easter, was always spent in the capital.'
'She liked that, I suppose.'
'Of course she liked it; everyone ought to like it at what was her age then, and what is yours now.'
'I like this,' said the Countess Wanda, to change the subject, as the servants set a little Japanese tea-table and two arm-chairs of gilt osier-work under one of the Siberian pines, whose boughs spread tent-like over the grass, on which the dogs were already stretched in anticipation of sugar and cakes.