These ladies, for they were that, stood in the market-place holding out the last relics of their former state—ermine stoles, fur tippets, embroidered slippers, fine linen, old boots (less broken than those they wore), cloth jackets, silk petticoats, trinkets with glittering stones, gold lockets, rings, lace, embroidery, perfumes, combs, hair pins, brooches. Some of them seemed hardly able to stand, and were thin and weak and haggard. Bertram noticed their hands, delicate and finely shaped, but grimed with dirt of hard work and lack of soap. Gipsy hands of patrician women. They avoided his eyes when he looked at them. They seemed startled by his own appearance, knew him instantly as a man of the class that was once theirs, and shrank from his scrutiny.
One girl, younger than the others, flamed scarlet at his glance, and turned her head away with visible distress. He did not look at her again, in order to avoid this hurt to her pride, and indeed he had a sense of shame in walking down the lines of those women, scrutinising their faces, witnessing this public humiliation of their pride. Yet he had an intense wish to get into conversation with them, to find out their way of life. They were the last of the old régime within the frontiers of Russia, less lucky than the Countess Lydia and her sister, and all the crowds of émigrés who had escaped in time. What stories they would have to tell! What agonies they must have suffered before arriving at this market-place!
He stood in front of an elderly woman who was holding out a little tray on which was a gilt crucifix. She had a thin face, with grey hair almost white, beneath a little black bonnet. He asked the price of her crucifix, speaking in French, and at his question her hands trembled so that she could hardly hold the tray.
“Why do you speak to me in French?” she asked, replying in the same language.
“I guessed you spoke French. And I don’t know a word of Russian.”
“You are not French?” she said, looking timidly into his face.
“I’m English.”
She answered him in his own tongue.
“I thought so when I saw you before you spoke. How do you come to be in Russia? Few foreigners come here now.”
“I’m a newspaper correspondent. I’ve come to write about the Famine, when I can get as far as that.”