The motive of the composition had evidently been at her suggestion, for her husband’s face expressed polite resignation either to superiority of skill or the triumph of accidental good fortune, giving him a position of secondary importance more or less unmerited.
His daughter-in-law half asleep before the fire, glanced up at the two figures for the hundredth time and yawned as one—even a pretty woman—yawns in the freedom of solitude: that is to say, open-mouthed.
The tap, tap of a cane came across the desert of waxed rosewood.
“My dear Nadège, I sympathize most cordially with you,” said a voice at the young woman’s elbow.
Nadège turned her ruddy head languidly and opened her sleepy grey eyes upon the fantastic figure before them.
“Why do you sympathize with me, my dear cousin?” she inquired. Her English was perfect, with, perhaps, a slight foreign precision rather than accent.
The dear cousin sat down upon the divan beside her. She was an ancient dame whose much wrinkled face, surmounted by the mingled purple and yellow dyes of an extraordinary turban, was still alive with a pair of malicious, sparkling black eyes. She grasped a tall cane at arm’s length in her skinny left hand, confronted the yawning beauty sharply, pressing a pointed forefinger of her equally skinny right claw upon the middle of the loveknot.
“You were stretching your mouth in the very face of Madam and the Governor. I saw you. It was done openly, without so much as the interposition of fan or finger. How often have I done it myself!” She chuckled at the thought. “You are bitterly regretting that you ever left St. Petersburg to bury yourself alive in this provincial capital of a republican colony. Is it not so, ma chère?”
“Perhaps you are right,” admitted the accused, “but it is only because Geoffrey is away. I declare, you people are so amusing.”
“Amusing? Then why do you yawn at us?”