“A woman . . .” smiled Susanna.  “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mould, is it?  I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches.  The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case.  I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself.  Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress.  Wait for me in the drawing-room.”

The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.

“What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him.  “She talks fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely.  She must be neurotic.”

The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly furnished, and had pretensions to luxury and style.  There were dark bronze dishes with patterns in relief, views of Nice and the Rhine on the tables, old-fashioned sconces, Japanese statuettes, but all this striving after luxury and style only emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly apparent in the gilt cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet table-cloths, the common oleographs in heavy frames.  The bad taste of the general effect was the more complete from the lack of finish and the overcrowding of the room, which gave one a feeling that something was lacking, and that a great deal should have been thrown away.  It was evident that the furniture had not been bought all at once, but had been picked up at auctions and other favourable opportunities.

Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even he noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place, which no luxury or style could efface—­a complete absence of all trace of womanly, careful hands, which, as we all know, give a warmth, poetry, and snugness to the furnishing of a room.  There was a chilliness about it such as one finds in waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at the theatres.

There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except, perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau.  The lieutenant looked round about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of talking.  But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe.  Now the lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black and as curly as lamb’s-wool.  She did not attract him, though she did not strike him as ugly.  He had a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady’s white face, the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or had been moulded out of transparent wax.  When she smiled she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that either.