“I don’t feel much at all, anymore,” he said. His face twisted into an odd, pained smile. It was a look she had never seen on him in the old days. She felt intuitively that he was telling the truth at that moment.

He drew up a chair and sat close to her. She jerked back convulsively. He said: “I won’t hurt you-”

“Hurt me?” Lydia gave a laugh that sounded unexpectedly brittle. “You’ll ruin my life!”

“You ruined mine,” he replied; then he frowned as if he had surprised himself.

“Oh, Feliks, I didn’t mean to.”

He was suddenly tense. There was a heavy silence. He gave that hurt smile again, and said: “What happened?”

She hesitated. She realized that all these years she had been longing to explain it to him. She began: “That night you tore my gown…”

“What are you going to do about this tear in your gown?” Feliks asked.

“The maid will put a stitch in it before I arrive at the embassy,” Lydia replied.

“Your maid carries needles and thread around with her?”

“Why else would one take one’s maid when one goes out to dinner?”

“Why indeed?” He was lying on the bed watching her dress. She knew that he loved to see her put her clothes on. He had once done an imitation of her pulling up her drawers which had made her laugh until it hurt.

She took the gown from him and put it on. “Everybody takes an hour to dress for the evening,” she said. “Until I met you I had no idea it could be done in five minutes. Button me up.”

She looked in the mirror and tidied her hair while he fastened the hooks at the back of her gown. When he had finished he kissed her shoulder. She arched her neck. “Don’t start again,” she said. She picked up the old brown cloak and handed it to him.

He helped her on with it. He said: “The lights go out when you leave.”

She was touched. He was not often sentimental. She said: “I know how you feel.”

“Will you come tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

At the door she kissed him and said: “Thank you.”

“I love you dearly,” he said.

She left him. As she went down the stairs she heard a noise behind her and looked back. Feliks’s neighbor was watching her from the door of the next apartment. He looked embarrassed when he caught her eye. She nodded politely to him, and he withdrew. It occurred to her that he could probably hear them making love through the wall. She did not care. She knew that what she was doing was wicked and shameful but she refused to think about it.

She went out into the street. Her maid was waiting on the corner. Together they walked to the park where the carriage was waiting. It was a cold evening, but Lydia felt as if she were glowing with her own warmth. She often wondered whether people could tell, just by looking at her, that she had been making love.

The coachman put down the step of the carriage for her and avoided her eyes. He knows, she thought with surprise; then she decided that that was fanciful.

In the coach the maid hastily repaired the back of Lydia’s gown. Lydia changed the brown cloak for a fur wrap. The maid fussed with Lydia’s hair. Lydia gave her ten rubles for her silence. Then they were at the British Embassy.

Lydia composed herself and went in.

It was not difficult, she found, to assume her other personality and become the modest, virginal Lydia whom polite society knew. As soon as she entered the real world she was terrified by the brute power of her passion for Feliks and she became quite genuinely a trembling lily. It was no act. Indeed, for most of the hours in the day she felt that this well-behaved maiden was her real self, and she thought she must be somehow possessed while she was with Feliks. But when he was there, and also when she was alone in bed in the middle of the night, she knew that it was her official persona that was evil, for it would have denied her the greatest joy she had ever known.

So she entered the hall, dressed in becoming white, looking young and a little nervous.

She met her cousin Kiril, who was nominally her escort. He was a widower of thirty-something years, an irritable man who worked for the Foreign Minister. He and Lydia did not much like each other, but because his wife was dead, and because Lydia’s parents did not enjoy going out, Kiril and Lydia had let it be known that they should be invited together. Lydia always told him not to trouble to call for her. This was how she managed to meet Feliks clandestinely.

“You’re late,” Kiril said.

“I’m sorry,” she replied insincerely.

Kiril took her into the salon. They were greeted by the ambassador and his wife, and then introduced to Lord Highcombe, elder son of the Earl of Walden. He was a tall, handsome man of about thirty, in well-cut but rather sober clothes. He looked very English, with his short, light brown hair and blue eyes. He had a smiling, open face, which Lydia found mildly attractive. He spoke good French. They made polite conversation for a few moments; then he was introduced to someone else.

“He seems rather pleasant,” Lydia said to Kiril.

“Don’t be fooled,” Kiril told her. “Rumor has it that he’s a tearaway.”

“You surprise me.”

“He plays cards with some officers I know, and they were telling me that he drinks them under the table some nights.”

“You know so much about people, and it’s always bad.”

Kiril’s thin lips twisted in a smile. “Is that my fault or theirs?”

Lydia said: “Why is he here?”

“In St. Petersburg? Well, the story is that he has a very rich and domineering father, with whom he doesn’t see eye to eye; so he’s drinking and gambling his way around the world while he waits for the old man to die.”

Lydia did not expect to speak to Lord Highcombe again, but the ambassador’s wife, seeing them both as eligible, seated them side by side at dinner. During the second course he tried to make conversation. “I wonder whether you know the Minister of Finance?” he said.

“I’m afraid not,” Lydia said coldly. She knew all about the man, of course, and he was a great favorite of the Czar; but he had married a woman who was not only divorced but also Jewish, which made it rather awkward for people to invite him. She suddenly thought how scathing Feliks would be about such prejudices; then the Englishman was speaking again.

“I should be most interested to meet him. I understand he’s terribly energetic and forward-looking. His Trans-Siberian Railway project is marvelous. But people say he’s not very refined.”

“I’m sure Sergey Yulevich Witte is a loyal servant of our adored sovereign,” Lydia said politely.

“No doubt,” Highcombe said, and turned back to the lady on his other side.

He thinks I’m boring, Lydia thought.

A little later she asked him: “Do you travel a great deal?”

“Most of the time,” he replied. “I go to Africa almost every year, for the big game.”

“How fascinating! What do you shoot?”

“Lion, elephant… a rhinoceros, once.”

“In the jungle?”

“The hunting is in the grasslands to the east, but I did once go as far south as the rain forest, just to see it.”

“And is it how it is pictured in books?”

“Yes, even to the naked black pygmies.”

Lydia felt herself flush, and she turned away. Now why did he have to say that? she thought. She did not speak to him again. They had conversed enough to satisfy the dictates of etiquette, and clearly neither of them was keen to go further.

After dinner she played the ambassador’s wonderful grand piano for a while; then Kiril took her home. She went straight to bed to dream of Feliks.

The next morning after breakfast a servant summoned her to her father’s study.

The count was a small, thin, exasperated man of fifty-five. Lydia was the youngest of his four children-the others were a sister and two brothers, all married. Their mother was alive but in continual bad health. The count saw little of his family. He seemed to spend most of his time reading. He had one old friend who came to play chess. Lydia had vague memories of a time when things were different and they were a jolly family around a big dinner table; but it was a long time ago. Nowadays a summons to the study meant only one thing: trouble.