“A film melodrama is a crude and tawdry thing compared to the real drama so many of us play in every moment of our lives.”
Neeland said to Rue, lightly:
“That is true as far as I have been concerned with that amazing box. It’s full of the very devil—of that Yellow Devil! When I pick it up now I seem to feel a premonitory tingling all over me—not entirely disagreeable,” he added to the Princess, “but the sort of half-scared exhilaration a man feels who takes a chance and is quite sure he’ll not have another chance if he loses. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes,” said the Princess unsmilingly, her clear, pleasant eyes fixed on him.
In her tranquil, indefinite expression there was something which made him wonder how many such chances this pretty woman had taken in her life of intellectual pleasure and bodily ease.
And now he remembered that Ilse Dumont apparently knew about her—about Ruhannah, too. And Ilse Dumont was the agent of a foreign government.
Was the Princess Mistchenka, patron and amateur of the arts, another such agent? If not, why had he taken this journey for her with this box of papers?
The passage of the Boulevard was slow; at every square traffic was halted; all Paris crowded the streets in the early afternoon sunshine, and the taxicab in which they sat made little speed until the Place de la Concorde opened out and the great Arc—a tiny phantom of lavender and pearl—spanned the vanishing 287 point of a fairy perspective between parallel and endless ramparts of tender green.
“There was a lot of war talk on the Volhynia,” said Neeland, “but I haven’t heard any since I landed, nor have I seen a paper. I suppose the Chancelleries have come to some agreement.”
“No,” said the Princess.