She had a little shiver of voluptuous horror, remembering what she had endured and escaped.  The sweet, true lines of her flawlessly made body were transiently undulant within a sheath of shimmering sequins:  a daring gown, by 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.

“Therese!  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.