"I hope I shall always be twenty," said the Princess lightly.
"Do you find your youth so precious, then?" asked Count Lavretsky.
"More than I ever did!" She laughed and again met Paul's eyes.
This time she flushed faintly as she held them for a fraction of a second. He had time to catch a veiled soft gleam intimate and disquieting. For some time he did not look again in her direction; when he did, he met in her eyes only the lazy smile with which she regarded all and sundry.
Later in the evening she said to him: "I'm glad you opposed Lavretsky. He makes me shiver. He was born old and wrinkled. He has never had a thrill in his life."
"And if you don't have thrills when you're young, you can't expect to have them when you're old," said Paul.
"He would ask what was the good of thrills."
"You don't expect me to answer, Princess."
"We know because we're young."
They stood laughing in the joy of their full youth, a splendid couple, some distance away from the others, ostensibly inspecting a luminous little Cima on the wall. The Princess loved it as the bright jewel of her collection, and Paul, with his sense of beauty and knowledge of art, loved it too. Yet, instead of talking of the picture, they talked of Lavretsky, who was looking at them sardonically from beneath his heavy eyelids.