"And Baron Saratoff is away on a most important mission."
"Absent husbands ought to be!"
"I don't believe she cares for him much."
"How can you tell that so soon?"
"Oh!" Milly replied vaguely, as if that were a point few women could keep from other women.
As a matter of fact the Russian lady had given Milly some new and startling lights upon marriage.
"I am," she told Milly in her precise speech, "what you call the 'show wife.' I go to parties, to court—all rigged up,—you say rigged, no?—dressed then very grand with my jewels. And I have children, see!" She pointed to the healthy little Saratoffs playing in the garden. "My husband goes away on his business—makes long journeys. He amuses himself. When he comes back, I have a child,—voilà." She laughed and showed her white teeth. "But I have my vacations sometimes, too, like this."
Milly thought that the Russian type of marriage must be much inferior to the American, at least the Chicago variety, where if there was any going away from home, it was usually the wife who went, and she confided this opinion to Jack, who said with a laugh:—
"Oh, you can never understand these foreigners. She's probably like every one else.... But I'd like to paint her and get that smile of hers."
"Why don't you ask her?"