“Gentlemen,” she said, “I think Sonia will forgive me for my indiscretion, if I betray the secret of her melancholy; Sonia Danidoff, kinswoman of the Tsar, enormously rich, pretty enough to make all the women on this earth jealous, Sonia Danidoff, good sirs, is preoccupied simply and solely because she is ... bored! Nay, do not protest; it is not that your society has displeased her! But Sonia, I know, finds life flat, stale and unprofitable; Sonia dreams of a great passion, of romantic love, such love as is hardly to be found in our times, such as she has hardly a chance of inspiring. And so Sonia is profoundly homesick. Now you are fairly warned!” With a wave of her slim, white hand: “Never believe that scatterbrain,” the princess protested; “I am not so ... romantic.”
A burst of laughter had greeted the statements of the young Russian; now all were listening to a charming, an exquisite Neapolitan boat-song.
But Tom Bob’s attention was not with the music. Quitting his seat—it was nearly two in the morning and the men were trifling with Egyptian cigarettes—he had come to lean over the back of the fair princess’s chair.
“Princess,” he was saying, “why do you refuse to seek a love a little more original, which means a little more real, than that commonly met with? I do not think that so absurd a quest.”
In an instant those wondrous eyes of the Princess Sonia Danidoff’s lit up, shining with a deep, soft radiance. She half turned round to look at the speaker, that amazing Tom Bob whose doughty deeds filled the Press, that wily detective, that hero.
“Sir,” she made answer, “you speak strangely. So you believe in love?”
“I do, madam,” replied the American, “and the more profoundly, and it may be the more sadly, as this very evening I have been a witness of the birth of two sentiments, one a half indifferent attraction, the other a genuine passion.”
“What reason for sadness in that, sir?”
“Every reason, for I am much afraid that these two sentiments will end in sadness and disillusionment.”
For a moment the princess sat silent, puzzled, hesitating. At last she spoke with an affectation of haughtiness such as every woman knows how to assume: