“I don’t mean to say that I knew Prince Roman at that remote time.  I begin to feel pretty ancient, but I am not so ancient as that.  In fact Prince Roman was married the very year my father was born.  It was in 1828; the 19th Century was young yet and the Prince was even younger than the century, but I don’t know exactly by how much.  In any case his was an early marriage.  It was an ideal alliance from every point of view.  The girl was young and beautiful, an orphan heiress of a great name and of a great fortune.  The Prince, then an officer in the Guards and distinguished amongst his fellows by something reserved and reflective in his character, had fallen headlong in love with her beauty, her charm, and the serious qualities of her mind and heart.  He was a rather silent young man; but his glances, his bearing, his whole person expressed his absolute devotion to the woman of his choice, a devotion which she returned in her own frank and fascinating manner.

“The flame of this pure young passion promised to burn for ever; and for a season it lit up the dry, cynical atmosphere of the great world of St. Petersburg.  The Emperor Nicholas himself, the grandfather of the present man, the one who died from the Crimean War, the last perhaps of the Autocrats with a mystical belief in the Divine character of his mission, showed some interest in this pair of married lovers.  It is true that Nicholas kept a watchful eye on all the doings of the great Polish nobles.  The young people leading a life appropriate to their station were obviously wrapped up in each other; and society, fascinated by the sincerity of a feeling moving serenely among the artificialities of its anxious and fastidious agitation, watched them with benevolent indulgence and an amused tenderness.

“The marriage was the social event of 1828, in the capital.  Just forty years afterwards I was staying in the country house of my mother’s brother in our southern provinces.

“It was the dead of winter.  The great lawn in front was as pure and smooth as an alpine snowfield, a white and feathery level sparkling under the sun as if sprinkled with diamond-dust, declining gently to the lake—­a long, sinuous piece of frozen water looking bluish and more solid than the earth.  A cold brilliant sun glided low above an undulating horizon of great folds of snow in which the villages of Ukrainian peasants remained out of sight, like clusters of boats hidden in the hollows of a running sea.  And everything was very still.

“I don’t know now how I had managed to escape at eleven o’clock in the morning from the schoolroom.  I was a boy of eight, the little girl, my cousin, a few months younger than myself, though hereditarily more quick-tempered, was less adventurous.  So I had escaped alone; and presently I found myself in the great stone-paved hall, warmed by a monumental stove of white tiles, a much more pleasant locality than the schoolroom, which for some reason or other, perhaps hygienic, was always kept at a low temperature.