"I'm alone. Valeria went away immediately after lunch. She goes around like a crazy woman on account of that scientist you have at your house. They must have made an engagement somewhere. All she talks about is Spain, because the women there marry without dowries. As for 'the General,' don't talk to me about her: I don't want to hear her name; she is dead—dead forever, as far as I am concerned! And I'm so bored all by myself; I think of things that make me weep; I go out, and my feet take me here without my realizing it."
Then she added with a graceful entreaty:
"Take me somewhere, wherever you feel like. Let's go a long ways from here. Where can we go?"
The Prince showed the same hesitation. They continually moved in the same circle, from their houses to the center of Monte Carlo, the Casino, and seemed lost if they tried to go any farther. The war had done away with private automobiles; to go on an excursion it was necessary to get a permit in advance. One could find nothing save carriages drawn by feeble horses, rejected by the Army.
"Suppose we go to Monaco?" Alicia proposed.
Monaco was in sight, on the other side of the harbor; a street car ran from there to Monte Carlo every twenty minutes, and nevertheless she made this proposal as though speaking of some remote country.
They had both spent some twenty years there, continually seeing the rock which bore on its crest the old city of the Princes; but, as though those places were painted on a back drop in the theater, it had never entered their heads to go that far. Alicia vaguely recalled a visit to the Palace of the Sovereign and another to the Museum of Oceanography, without being able to formulate her impressions. Lubimoff also from his automobile had seen the garden, the old houses, and a large square, the one day that he had visited the Prince of Monaco in his old castle.
They decided on the trip with the glee of school children, and when the Duchess went to call a cab, Michael showed a certain hesitation as he searched through various pockets.
He had no money. He had dropped it all in the roulette, absolutely all. At the hotel he had asked them to charge his lunch, handing over his last few francs to the waiter as a tip.
Alicia greeted his worried look with bursts of laughter. Lubimoff unable to pay a cabman! Monte Carlo was the only place where you could see things like that.