V

WHEN TITLED WOMEN STOOP TO CONQUER

13.  The next entry: 

“My ammunition was no good!...  But I am at a loss to understand what they are trying to do with ME....  Certainly I don’t look like a very important personage in my present state....  Yet my captors are not treating me very badly ... aside from being locked up in this deserted villa with its broken chairs and vacant picture frames and general air of hasty abandonment there’s nothing to disturb the tranquillity of my reflections except the recurring tramp of the muffled sentry below my broken window ... this building has a sort of Byzantine cut in its architectural design....  On the other side of the valley there’s a minaret or two visible through the smoky haze....  Off to the left I can make out quite distinctly the outlines of a Greek Cross....  The road leading toward that Cross looks like the work of a Muscovite engineer,—­which speaks well for it....  It’s built of the same material as the one over the mountains from Tiflis to Vladicaucaz and Kislovodsk....  I MUST BE ON RUSSIAN SOIL!...  But what is mystifying to me is, how did that veiled girl of the Metropole manage to know the SENTRY who is guarding my person so methodically down below?...  She has been here twice, now, and talks to him very confidentially....  QUATSCH! if she thinks to find any jewelry clinging to my person she’ll have to fry me to get it out.”

14.  Then this entry: 

“The veiled Metropole Nemesis was to see the sentry today....  She seemed to be quite happy about something and looked up in the direction of my window a number of times....  She was eating some of those champagne-colored rose leaves that are crystallized by the firm of Demitrof at Moscow and sold as confections to the ladies of the Court!...  What does it mean?...  Furthermore, if that sentry is not the same man who acted as valet to Prince Galitzyn at Monte Carlo when Delcasse, Grey and Galitzyn (otherwise “Count Techlow”) were gliding about the Grand Hotel de Londres!

“The mystery is solved....

“That Metropole woman was the companion to Countess C——­ at the Nouvel Hotel Louvre the day I met her at Monte Carlo!... and this man was the same fellow she was supping her cafe Turc and smoking her Medijeh cigarettes with out on the Terrace Gardens of the Hotel de Londres the night I was waiting for an American millionaire to break away from the Hungarian noblewoman at the table decorated with La France roses and the same kind of roses pinned to her corsage....  The American, if he ever sees this in print, will remember the lady with the wonderful jewels flashing from her wrists and neck and whom the man with the Boulanger moustache at the adjoining table was trying hard to flirt with ... the same dark-eyed Juno that same American met in the Salle des Etrangers at the Casino, the following day about noon....