The Genius | Page 4

succeeded.
Its results were for the eyes of all men. For Moscow society had been

suddenly commanded to his house, to a ball, given on New Year's night,
in honor of his Imperial Majesty Nicholas I., who had decided, by his
appearance, to honor the house of his subject and immediate servant.
* * * * *
It was eleven o'clock on that night of nights; and the bed and dressing
rooms of the Princess Sophia were lighted to suffocation with smoking
candles. Two maids and old Másha, general factotum of her mistress,
were bustling importantly from one room to the other, bearing to her,
piece by piece, their mistress's burden of jewels. At her dressing-table,
pale, still wearing, as always in public, her mask of emotionless
impenetrability, sat Sophia. Her neck and shoulders, which, according
to the rigid etiquette of court-dress, were fully exposed, were white,
and, considering her extreme slenderness, surprisingly round. A broad
collar of sapphires and diamonds clasped above an Oriental necklace of
pearls, successfully hid whatever there was to betray the too-visible
marks of the "certain" age. On her head she bore the oddly becoming
kakoshnik, which, in her case, was set with a triple row of superb
diamonds. The face below this gleaming structure, the delicate, weary
face, robbed of its customary frame of smoothly banded yellow hair,
looked more sharply pointed than usual, but surprisingly pretty. For
there was actually a fire--whether of pleasure, expectancy or
nervousness--in her gray eyes; and there had come a delicate flush to
the usually pallid cheeks. Sophia was, indeed, living with her dead
to-night. Dreams of the old days held her in a kind of spell. The woman
of memories--memories of a brief youth, a swiftly blighted flowering
of life--had for once been forced back to a forgotten theme. And she
found, recalling the days of her first balls, that the customary bitterness
of contrast had suddenly disappeared. There was much that was new in
this present situation: she was alive to sensations unfelt for years. There
stirred in her heart what she was only to define after it had gone again:
that which for most people forms the great staff of the inner life: on
which she had been so long unaccustomed to lean--the great Phoenix,
Hope.
At length they had fastened the last pin in her veil, the last hook in the

heavy gown of cloth of silver. The maids stood off from her a little,
whispering. But she herself remained motionless, gazing absently into
her quaintly framed old mirror, lost in one of those reveries that her
servants had learned not to disturb. The pause had lasted some five
minutes when the door opening into the outer hall opened, vigorously,
and the Princess started suddenly up, her face changing pathetically, a
look of dread painfully contracting her features.
As their mistress rose, the three women shrank instinctively backward.
To one understanding it, the act was pathetically familiar. An instant
later, however, the Princess cried out, "Caroline! It is you, then?" and
so turned deathly white and reeled a little till old Másha came to her
support.
"Sophie! You are not ill--to-night!" The new-comer, who had spoken in
French, halted near the door, an expression of dismay on her face.
Madame Gregoriev, however, laughed faintly, and the color began to
creep back into her cheeks. As old Másha left her to hobble briskly out
of the room, she continued, "No, no! I am perfectly well. It was only
that you--startled me a little. I--I thought it was--Michael Petrovitch."
Once more the face of the other changed, but she said nothing as she
came slowly forward, examining her companion the while with a
critical eye. She was the Countess Dravikine, Sophia's younger sister,
who, a year or two after Sophia's misalliance, had herself married
remarkably well: a young diplomat of the capital, already high in the
graces of the official world, and destined to rise steadily, through the
clever management of his wife. The Countess Dravikine fitted her
adopted world extremely well. She was a woman whose one tender
sentiment was that which she held for the sister of her youth. Otherwise
she had, not entirely without justice, been called heartless. She was, in
any case, admirably adapted for the life she had chosen. And strife
social and political, as well as every move in the great game of state
intrigue, were as the breath of life to her. She had not come through the
fires unsinged. There had been, nay, still were, whispers about her in
her world. But they were whispers such as heightened rather than
tarnished the brilliance of her reputation. For, whether wrongly or not,

her name had more than once been linked with that of the Iron Ruler
himself. This may or may not