“Exactly.  That’s what I am now.  Lucie de Clive, Monsieur, a vaudeville actress.  That’s me.”

“A nice party, isn’t it?” she said.  “Syvorotka and Lucie?” “But—­tell me before everything else, can I stay here?”

“Stay here?  Pardon me, Baroness....”

“Call me Lucie, please....”

“Pardon me, Lucie, but really I don’t quite comprehend.  In these times, of course, everything has changed; but still I wish I could understand it correctly....”

“Oh, yes, you will not be bad to a poor girl, Alex, will you?  I simply have to stay here—­I have no other place to go.”

To show her resoluteness, she took off her shabby overcoat and started to arrange her belongings, an impossible suitcase and something heavy rolled in a yellow and red blanket, looking to me from time to time with curiosity and doubt.

“Lucie de Clive!  A woman certainly could not think of anything less snobbish even in these circumstances.  You look like a real Russian Katka-Chort in this outfit.”

“That’s what is required.  How did you happen to pick out your name?”

We both laughed.  Indeed, if our meeting were compared to all the luxury and brilliance of the Cote d’Azur, or Petrograd—­it was laughable.  “Have we anything to eat?” she asked.

“I came home for my supper,” I said.  “I have some trash in the pantry.”

While I was preparing in the so-called kitchen something nice out of a piece of frozen pilmeni—­hashed meat and an old can of sardines (my pride) she began to arrange the room.  She acted as if she were trying to justify her presence, it was clear.  But with all the pleasure of seeing someone around my house, I simply could not think what had happened to her.  Baroness B.—­a lady who would not hesitate in olden times to play a thousand pounds on a horse or order ten dresses at Paquin’s,—­here, asking my hospitality!  If she were a Russian—­I could understand it,—­wives of Privy Counsellors and Ambassadors are selling cheese in Petrograd now.  But she—­a Foreign Lady?...  It was clear, she was in some intrigue as usual, and it had led her too far.

Possibly she is after me....  And besides—­her very presence would affect my work, and endanger myself.  “I must give her something to eat, and then get out of here.  The L. would keep me for a while, and then I shall go away.  Let her stay in this house with all of her strange intrigues, for I cannot throw her out.”

Thus trying to understand, I finished my cooking and asked her to the salle-a-manger—­the same little kitchen.

But no matter how proud I felt of my housekeeping, the Baroness found fault with everything.  “Don’t we have a table cloth?  Or napkins?  What are these daggers for?”

“Good God, Syvorotka,” she said, “we cannot live in such a miserable way.  I’ll have to change it.  There are no reasons why we should revert to cannibalism!”