"I don't know why you should be amazed," said he stiffly.
"You've been telling me ever since I was a kid that women were all useless, all alike—"
"I find I was mistaken," he interrupted. "They aren't all alike. There's only one Mayis. She is—different."
"What do you talk about all the time? You're with her constantly."
"I'm not with her any more than you're with the Queen," he shot back at me. "What do you find to talk about?"
That shut me up. He went to look for Mayis; and I wandered to the royal apartments in search of Aga.
In the first days of our friendship I had several times surprised in Aga's eyes a curious expression, one that seemed compounded of despair, horror and resignation.
I had seen that same expression in the eyes of the nobles of late, and in the faces of all the people I encountered in the streets—who, I mustn't forget to add here, never failed to treat me with a deference that was as intoxicating as it was inexplicable.
It was as though some terrible fate hovered over the populace, some dreadful doom about which nothing could be done. No one put into words any fears that might confirm that impression; but continually I got the idea that everybody there went about in a state of attempting to live normally and happily while life was still left—before some awful, wholesale death descended on them.