Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength of the words. She would not, he thinks, feel so strongly unless she felt more than he allows: he gazes at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration and regret. "If Madame Sabaroff," he murmurs, "can doubt her own powers of compelling remembrance, she is the one person on earth only who can do so." She is stung to anger. "I am really at loss to decide whether you are intentionally insolent or unintentionally insincere. You are possibly both." "I am neither. I am only a man who passionately and uselessly rebels against his fate." "Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. That is nothing uncommon." "Well, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, and who would atone for it would you allow him." "Atone! Do you suppose that you owe me reparation? It is I who owe you thanks for a momentary oblivion which did me immeasurable service." "That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess Xenia whom I knew was neither so stern nor so sceptical." "The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake her." Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room. Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation with Nina Curzon. "Why did you pretend not to know her?" says Mrs. Curzon to him. He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what he would be thought a brute to put into words. "She does not deign to know me--now," he says, modestly, and to the experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest, tell her as much as the loudest boast could do. CHAPTER IX. Gervase saunters in to his hostess's boudoir the next morning, availing himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it pleases them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It is a charming boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the walls hung with flowered silk of that epoch, and the dado made of fans which belonged to the same period. Lady Usk writes here at a little secrétaire painted by Fragonard, and uses an inkstand said to have belonged to Madame de Parabère, made in the shape of a silver shell driven by a gold Cupidon; yet, despite the frivolity of these associations, she contrives to get through a vast mass of business at this fragile table, and has one of the soundest heads for affairs in all England. Gervase sits down and makes himself agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of his recent experiences.