He found himself on his feet in the middle of the study, looking anxiously toward the door and muttering stupid excuses. "No, I must go: it is late. Some friends are waiting for me...." She had gained control of herself. She too was standing looking at him with astonishment and wrath.
"You are the only one who could do a thing like this," she said, in a cutting tone, as they parted. "I see it all clearly now. I hate you as you hate me. My whim was a stupid one. You have permitted yourself a liberty which no one in the world will ever be able to take again. If I were younger than I am I would thrash you again as I did in the Bois; but instead, just consider that I am repeating everything I said then."
They did not see each other again.
When the Prince had set in order everything concerning the inheritance from his mother, he thought of resuming his voyages, but on a more magnificent scale. It was no longer necessary for him to ask the Princess for money. He was one of the great millionaires of the world. Those who were in charge of the administration of his affairs—an office with numerous clerks, almost equalling the government bureau of a small state—made the announcement that the fifteen million francs which the Princess had received annually would soon be twenty, through the development of Russian railways, which allowed more intensive working of his mines.
The Colonel was commissioned to have the heavy medieval walls of Villa Sirena torn down, and the place replanned according to the Prince's tastes. The latter hated architectural resuscitations. He could not bear modern buildings patterned to flatter the pride of the rich proprietors, after the Alhambra, the palaces of Florence, or the solemn and orderly constructions of Versailles.
"The furniture ought to correspond to the period," said Michael, "and people ought to live in such houses as they lived in in the century which produced that particular style. People living in an ancient house ought to dress and eat as in former times.... What an absurdity to reconstruct those historic shells, with the interior arranged to suit the needs of modern men who are forced to commit an anachronism at every step!"
He recalled the project of a millionaire friend of his, a member of the Institute, who had built a Roman house on the Riviera, Roman in all the exactness of its details. At the house-warming the guests were obliged to sleep on corded beds and to eat reclining on couches; and even more intimate conveniences were modeled on the principle of hygiene known to the ancient Cæsars. Within twenty-four hours they all pretended they had received urgent telegrams calling them to Paris, and the owner himself after a few months, left his house in charge of a keeper to show to tourists as a museum.
Michael was fond of modern architecture, whose cathedrals are machine shops and large railway stations. Applied to dwellings it pleased him for its lack of style: white walls, a few moldings, rounded corners, with no angles whatsoever, so that the dust might be pursued to its remotest hiding places, wide openings letting in the breeze and the sunlight, double walls between which hot or cold air, and water at various temperatures, could circulate.
"Up to the present time," the Prince asserted, "man has lived in magnificent jewel cases of art and filth. Modern architects have done more in the last thirty years to make life pleasant than the artist-builders, so much admired by history, did in three thousand. They have declared running water and the bath-room as indispensable, things which were unknown to kings themselves half a century ago. They have invented the furnace and the water closet. Don't talk to me about the magnificent palaces of Versailles, where there was not a single toilet, and where every morning the lackeys were obliged to empty two hundred vessels for the king and his courtiers. Often to be through quicker, they threw their contents out of the majestic windows, and sometimes it would fall on the sedan chair and the retinue of a Dauphine or an ambassador."
Toledo applied himself to supervising the construction of Villa Sirena in accordance with the desires of the Prince, making it a plain white building, and without any definite style of architecture. Lubimoff himself, at the proper time, would take charge of the artistic touches, placing famous pictures, statues, tapestries, or rugs, just where they would be most pleasing to the eye. The house was to be a harmony of simple, pure lines. The walls were to have heating and cooling systems for the different seasons, and running water was to be available in abundance everywhere. Each room was to have its electric lights and its electric fan.