On turning her head and seeing a stranger, she appeared very much startled.  From her slender figure Miss Haldin had taken her for a young girl; but if her face was almost childishly round, it was also sallow and wrinkled, with dark rings under the eyes.  A thick crop of dusty brown hair was parted boyishly on the side with a lateral wave above the dry, furrowed forehead.  After a moment of dumb blinking, she suddenly squatted down on the floor.

“What do you mean by squatted down?” I asked, astonished.  “This is a very strange detail.”

Miss Haldin explained the reason.  This person when first seen was carrying a small bowl in her hand.  She had squatted down to put it on the floor for the benefit of a large cat, which appeared then from behind her skirts, and hid its head into the bowl greedily.  She got up, and approaching Miss Haldin asked with nervous bluntness—­

“What do you want?  Who are you?”

Miss Haldin mentioned her name and also the name of Peter Ivanovitch.  The girlish, elderly woman nodded and puckered her face into a momentary expression of sympathy.  Her black silk blouse was old and even frayed in places; the black serge skirt was short and shabby.  She continued to blink at close quarters, and her eyelashes and eyebrows seemed shabby too.  Miss Haldin, speaking gently to her, as if to an unhappy and sensitive person, explained how it was that her visit could not be an altogether unexpected event to Madame de S—.

“Ah!  Peter Ivanovitch brought you an invitation.  How was I to know?  A dame de compangnie is not consulted, as you may imagine.”

The shabby woman laughed a little.  Her teeth, splendidly white and admirably even, looked absurdly out of place, like a string of pearls on the neck of a ragged tramp.  “Peter Ivanovitch is the greatest genius of the century perhaps, but he is the most inconsiderate man living.  So if you have an appointment with him you must not be surprised to hear that he is not here.”

Miss Haldin explained that she had no appointment with Peter Ivanovitch.  She became interested at once in that bizarre person.

“Why should he put himself out for you or any one else?  Oh! these geniuses.  If you only knew!  Yes!  And their books—­I mean, of course, the books that the world admires, the inspired books.  But you have not been behind the scenes.  Wait till you have to sit at a table for a half a day with a pen in your hand.  He can walk up and down his rooms for hours and hours.  I used to get so stiff and numb that I was afraid I would lose my balance and fall off the chair all at once.”

She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes, fixed on Miss Haldin’s face, betrayed no animation whatever.  Miss Haldin, gathering that the lady who called herself a dame de compangnie was proud of having acted as secretary to Peter Ivanovitch, made an amiable remark.

“You could not imagine a more trying experience,” declared the lady.  “There is an Anglo-American journalist interviewing Madame de S—­ now, or I would take you up,” she continued in a changed tone and glancing towards the staircase.  “I act as master of ceremonies.”