“To look at them it would be hard to say which one looks more like a jealous husband than the other....”
CHAPTER III
THE Countess Titonius appeared one day at one of Elena’s teas. The Countess was a Russian lady who had married a Scandinavian nobleman, by which act she had cast him into such complete eclipse that no one could remember ever having seen him.
Well on the way toward fifty, the Countess still possessed the dregs, albeit somewhat muddy, of a remote but once heady beauty. Her overflowing obesity, her white and flaccid flesh, now served as the support for a head and face much like those of a sentimental doll; and as the Countess was given to writing amorous verses and reciting them to anyone within hearing, she was frequently referred to in the circles in which she moved, as “the five-hundred-weight of poetry.”
Already generously decolleté by mid-afternoon, her gigantic and barbarous jewels adorned the hollows and rotundities of her quivering flesh, or set off the high lights of a red gold wig for which the Countess was perpetually purchasing additional curls.
For the most part her jewels were quite shamelessly false. Most worthy of respect among their number was a pearl necklace, which, whenever the Countess deposited her bulk in a chair, dangled grotesquely over the protruding spheres of her opulent form. The pearls, irregular, triangular-shaped, and with root marks, resembled the shark’s teeth with which the members of certain savage tribes like to adorn themselves. Gossip asserted that they were souvenirs of those lovers of her youth of whom she had been able finally to extract nothing else.... It was undeniable that the Countess was given to speaking, with no perceptible restraint, of her innumerable tender experiences.
No sooner had the Countess learned from Elena’s own lips, that Robledo was a millionaire fresh from the American wild, than she began casting glances of passionate interest in his direction. Teacup in hand, she captured him in a corner, and began a conversation to escape from which he frantically sought a pretext.
“You, who are such a traveller, such a hero, must give me the benefit of your experience. Tell me, what is your real opinion about love?”
The poetess heard the hero murmuring excuses. In spite of the tender glances of her miopic eyes, she had frightened him!
A few weeks later Elena asked him to accept an invitation to a reception at the Countess’s. “It will be amusing. Titonius is sure to ask her Bohemian friends, so as to have some applause for her poems—of course she’ll read them! There’ll be a lot of people there who come in the hope of meeting celebrities, and there’ll be no-account artists, and youths convinced that they have achieved immortality because they’ve succeeded in collecting a train of admirers, or get their things published in the columns of some wretched little sheet that nobody reads. You ought to see all those absurd people! There isn’t another house like that one in Paris. Anyway I promised the Countess that you would come and I’ll be cross if you don’t!”