214 215
me!” she responded. “Please don’t talk to me about the opera; you
know nothing about music. I’d better meet you on your own ground,
and talk about your majolica and engravings. Come now, what trea-
sure have yo been buying lately at the old curiosity shops?”
“Would you like me to show you? But you don’t understand such
things.”
“Oh, do show me! I’ve been learning about them at those—what’s
their names?...the bankers...they’ve some splendid engravings. They
showed them to us.”
“Why, have you been at the Schuetzburgs?” asked the hostess
from the samovar.
“Yes, ma chere. They asked my husband and me to dinner, and
told us the sauce at that dinner cost a hundred pounds,” Princess
Myakaya said, speaking loudly, and conscious everyone was listening;
“and very nasty sauce it was, some green mess. We had to ask them,
and I made them sauce for eighteen pence, and everybody was very
much pleased with it. I can’t run to hundred-pound sauces.”
“She’s unique!” said the lady of the house.
“Marvelous!” said someone.
The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya’s speeches was al-
ways unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the
fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said
simple things with some sense in them. In the society in which she
lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epi-
gram. Princess Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but
she knew it had, and took advantage of it.
As everyone had been listening while Princess Myakaya spoke,
and so the conversation around the ambassador’s wife had dropped,
Princess Betsy tried to bring the whole party together, and turned to
the ambassador’s wife.
“Will you really not have tea? You should come over here by us.”
“No, we’re very happy here,” the ambassador’s wife responded with
a smile, and she went on with the conversation that had been begun.
“It was a very agreeable conversation. They were criticizing the
Karenins, husband and wife.
“Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There’s some-
thing strange about her,” said her friend.
“The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of
Alexey Vronsky,” said the ambassador’s wife.
“Well, what of it? There’s a fable of Grimm’s about a man without
a shadow, a man who’s lost his shadow. And that’s his punishment for
something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a
woman must dislike being without a shadow.”
“Yes, but women with a shadow usually come to a bad end,” said
Anna’s friend.
“Bad luck to your tongue!” said Princess Myakaya suddenly. “Ma-
dame Karenina’s a splendid woman. I don’t like her husband, but I like
her very much.”
“Why don’t you like her husband? He’s such a remarkable man,”
said the ambassador’s wife. “My husband says there are few states-
men like him in Europe.”
“And my husband tells me just the same, but I don’t believe it,”
said Princess Myakaya. “If our husbands didn’t talk to us, we should
see the facts as they are. Alexey Alexandrovitch, to my thinking, is
simply a fool. I say it in a whisper...but doesn’t it really make everything
clear? Before, when I was told to consider him clever, I kept looking for
his ability, and thought myself a fool for not seeing it; but directly I said,
he a fool, though only in a whisper, everything’s explained, isn’t it?”