Red Masquerade | Page 9

British standards of that day, but permissible because
she was Russian; foreigners, you know, are so frightfully weird even
when they're quite all right.
And yet she was growing old, she was twenty-five! Though she didn't
feel in the least like one on the threshold of middle age. Indeed, she had
never felt younger, more thrillingly instinct with the power and the will
to live extravagantly in one endless riot of youth unquenchable....
Reaction, of course: the swing of the pendulum to its farthest extreme.
It was now two years since she had been forced to separate from Victor,
finding herself unable longer to countenance and suffer his many-sided
beastliness; and a year since the hand of Death had penned an
inexorable finis to the too-brief chapter of her one great romance.
For there had never been love in her life with Victor. She had been too
young at first to appreciate what love and marriage meant, she had been
led to the altar and sacrificed upon it as an animal is led in sacrificial
rites--without premonition or understanding, only wondering (perhaps)
to find itself so groomed and garlanded, so flattered and adored. She
had hardly known Victor before she was given to him in marriage by
Imperial ukase ... to get rid of her, probably, for some inscrutable
reason related to the mysterious circumstances of her parentage.
And now after six years of hell with her husband and one of mourning
in solitude for her love that was lost, she was coming back to life
again ... at last!
She lifted up arms that might have been a dream of Phidias chiselled in

Parian marble, and stretched them luxuriously. She was superbly alive,
indeed--and henceforth she meant to live. Only she must be careful to
retain her looks ... If Youth must surely go, Beauty must linger and
reign long in its stead.
A maid, a comely creature, trim and smart in black and white, with that
vividly coloured prettiness which is too often the omen of premature
decline into the fat and florid thirties, fetched a wrap and settled it upon
Sofia's shoulders.
Long and dark, it disguised her figure as completely as it covered her
toilette. She nodded her satisfaction, and accepted the veil which she
had desired to complete her disguise, a thing of Spanish lace, black and
ample, like a mantilla. But before donning it she delayed one minute
more before the mirror.
"Thérèse! Am I still beautiful?"
"Madame la princesse is always beautiful."
"As beautiful as I used to be?"
"But madame la princesse grows more lovely every day."
"Beautiful enough to-night, to keep out of jail, do you think?"
To the mirth in the voice of her mistress the maid responded with a
smile demure and discreet.
"Oh, madame!" was all she said; but the manner of her saying it was
rarely eloquent.
Sofia laughed lightly, and affectionately pinched the cheek of the maid.
"And you, my little one," she said in liquid French--"you yourself are
too ravishingly pretty to keep out of trouble. Do you know that?"
Her little one looked more than ever demure as she enquired after the
hidden meaning of madame la princesse.
"Because you will marry too soon, Thérèse--too soon some worthless
man will persuade you to dedicate all those charms to him alone."
"Oh, madame!"
"Is it not so?"
"Who knows, madame?" said Thérèse, as who should say: "What must
be, must."
"Then there is a man! I suspected as much."
"But, madame la princesse, is there not always a man?"
"Then beware!"
"Madame la princesse need not fear for me," Thérèse replied. "Me, my

head is not so easily turned. There is always some man, naturally--there
are so many men!--but when I marry, rest assured, it will be for
something more."
With the compressed lips of self-approbation she deftly assisted her
mistress to swathe her head in the mantilla-like veil.
"Something more than a man?" Sofia enquired through its folds. "What
then?"
"Independence, madame la princesse."
"What an idea! Marriage and independence: how do you reconcile that
paradox?"
"Madame la princesse means love, I think, when she speaks of
marriage. But love--that is all over and done with when one marries.
One is then ready to settle down; one has put by one's dot, and marries
a worthy, industrious man with a little fortune of his own. With such a
husband one collaborates in the maintenance of the ménage and the
management of a small business, something substantial if small. And so
one ends one's days in comfortable companionship. That, madame la
princesse, is the marriage for Thérèse! It may not sound romantic,
madame, but it has this rare virtue--it lasts!"

VII
FAMILY REUNION
The London night was normal: that is to say, wet. Darkness had
transformed