For all answer the dame de compagnie turned away her head.

“It is very unfortunate—­very unfortunate indeed.  I very much regret that you should have been....”  He lowered suddenly his voice.  “But what is it—­surely you are not departing, Natalia Victorovna?  You got bored waiting, didn’t you?”

“Not in the least,” Miss Haldin protested.  “Only I have been here some time, and I am anxious to get back to my mother.”

“The time seemed long, eh?  I am afraid our worthy friend here” (Peter Ivanovitch suddenly jerked his head sideways towards his right shoulder and jerked it up again),—­“our worthy friend here has not the art of shortening the moments of waiting.  No, distinctly she has not the art; and in that respect good intentions alone count for nothing.”

The dame de compagnie dropped her arms, and the cat found itself suddenly on the ground.  It remained quite still after alighting, one hind leg stretched backwards.  Miss Haldin was extremely indignant on behalf of the lady companion.

“Believe me, Peter Ivanovitch, that the moments I have passed in the hall of this house have been not a little interesting, and very instructive too.  They are memorable.  I do not regret the waiting, but I see that the object of my call here can be attained without taking up Madame de S—­’s time.”

At this point I interrupted Miss Haldin.  The above relation is founded on her narrative, which I have not so much dramatized as might be supposed.  She had rendered, with extraordinary feeling and animation, the very accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor.  Miss Haldin’s true and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked by the uncongenial fate of her new acquaintance, that lady companion, secretary, whatever she was.  For my own part, I was pleased to discover in it one more obstacle to intimacy with Madame de S—.  I had a positive abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch.  I do not know what was her attitude to the unseen, but I know that in the affairs of this world she was avaricious, greedy, and unscrupulous.  It was within my knowledge that she had been worsted in a sordid and desperate quarrel about money matters with the family of her late husband, the diplomatist.  Some very august personages indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving in her affairs) had incurred her animosity.  I find it perfectly easy to believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for reasons of state, into some discreet maison de sante—­a madhouse of sorts, to be plain.  It appears, however, that certain high-placed personages opposed it for reasons which....

But it’s no use to go into details.