They'll trample us men underfoot as contemptible, grovelling slaves.
Their extravagant wishes and whims will become painful laws for us.
And all because throughout the generations we've been unable to worship and revere love.
It will be a vengeance.
You know the law: action and reaction are equal and opposite."
He paused a while, then asked suddenly,
"Tell me, Vera, if only you don't find it embarrassing, what was that story about a telegraphist which Prince Vasily told us tonight?
How much of it is fact and how much his usual embellishment?"
"Do you really wish to know, Grandad?"
"Only if you care to tell me, Vera.
If for some reason you'd rather not — "
"Not at all.
I'll tell you with pleasure."
And she told the general in detail about a crazy man who had begun to pursue her with his love two years before her marriage.
She had never seen him, and did not know his name.
He had only written to her, signing G.S.Z.
Once he had mentioned that he was a clerk in some office — he had not said a word about the telegraph office.
He was apparently watching her movements closely, because in his letters he always mentioned very accurately where she had spent this or that evening and in what company, and how she had been dressed.
At first his letters sounded vulgar and ludicrously ardent, although they were quite proper.
But once she wrote to ask him — "by the way. Grandad, don't let that out to our people: nobody knows it" — not to annoy her any more with his protestations of love.
From then on he wrote no more about love and sent her only an occasional letter — at Easter, on New Year's Eve, and on her birthday.
Princess Vera also told the general about that day's parcel and gave him almost word for word the strange letter from her mysterious admirer.
"Y-es," the general drawled at last. "Perhaps he's just an addle-head, a maniac, or — who knows? — perhaps the path of your life has been crossed by the very kind of love that women dream about and men are no longer capable of.
Just a moment.
Do you see lights moving ahead?
That must be my carriage."
At the same time they heard behind them the blare of a motor-car and the road, rutted by wheels, shone in a white acetylene light.
Gustav Ivanovich drove up.
"I've taken your things with me, Anna.
Get in," he said. "May I give you a lift, Your Excellency?"
"No, thank you, my friend," answered the general. "I don't like that engine.
All it does is shake and stink — there's no pleasure in it.
Well, good night, Vera dear.
I'll be coming often now," he said, kissing Vera's forehead and hands.
There were goodbyes all round.
Friesse drove Vera Nikolayevna to the gale of her villa and, swiftly describing a circle, shot off into the darkness in his roaring, puffing motor-car.
IX
With a disagreeable feeling Princess Vera stepped on to the terrace and walked into the house.
From a distance she heard the loud voice of her brother Nikolai and saw his gaunt figure darting back and forth across the room.
Vasily Lvovich sat at the card table, his large head with the cropped tow hair bent low as he traced lines on the green cloth with a piece of chalk.
"It should have been done long ago!" said Nikolai irritably, making a gesture with his light hand as if he were throwing down some invisible burden. "I was convinced long ago that an end should have been put to those foolish letters.
Vera wasn't yet your wife when I told you that you and she ought not to make fun of them like children, seeing only what was laughable in them.
Here's Vera herself, by the way.
Vasily Lvovich and I were talking about that madman of yours, P.P.Z.
I consider the correspondence insolent and vulgar."
"There was no correspondence," Sheyin interrupted him coldly. "He was the only one who wrote."
Vera blushed at that, and sat down on the sofa, in the shade of a large fan-palm.
"I'm sorry," said Nikolai Nikolayevich, and threw down the invisible heavy object, as if he had tom it from his chest.
"I wonder why you call him mine," Vera put in, heartened by her husband's support. "He's mine as much as he's yours."
"All right, I'm sorry again.