In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new _champ de manœuvres_, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes. “My name is Anastasya,” she says irrelevantly to him, as if she had stupidly forgotten, before, this little detail. Whew! his poor ragged eyelashes flutter, a cloud of astonishment passes grotesquely over his face; like the clown of the piece, he looks as though he were about to rub his head, click his tongue, and give his nearest man-neighbour an enthusiastic kick. “Anastasya!” It will be “Tasy” soon! He outwardly becomes more solemn than ever, like a merchant who sees an incredible dupe before him, and would in some way conceal his exhilaration. But he calls her carefully at regular intervals, Anastasya! “I suppose you’ve come here to work?” he asked. “I don’t want to work any more than is absolutely necessary. I am overworked as it is, by living merely.” He could well believe it; she must do some overtime! “If it were not for my excellent constitution⸺” This was evidently, Kreisler felt, the moment to touch on the heaviness of life’s burden; as her expression was perfectly even and non-committal. “Ah, yes,” he sighed heavily, one side of the menu rising gustily and relapsing, “Life gives one work enough.” She looked at him and reflected, “What work does ‘cet oiseau-là’ perform?” “Have you many friends here, Anastasya?” “None.”—She laughed with ostentatious satisfaction at his funniness. “I came here, as a matter of fact, to be alone. I want to see only fresh people. I have had all the gusto and illusion I had lent all round steadily handed back to me where I come from. ‘I beg your pardon! Your property, ma’am!’ The result is that I am amazingly rich!—I am tremendously rich!” She opened her eyes wide; Kreisler pricked up his ears and wondered if this were to be taken in another sense. He cast down his eyes respectfully. “I have the sort of feeling that I have enough to go all round.—But perhaps I haven’t!” Kreisler lingered over her first observation: “wanted to be alone.” The indirect compliment conveyed (and he felt, when it was said, that he was somewhere near the frontier, surely, of a German confidence) was rather mitigated by what followed. The “having enough to go all round”; that was very universal, and included him too easily in its sweep. “Do you want to go all round?” he asked, with heavy plagiarism of her accent, and solemn sentimental face. “I don’t want to be mean.” His eyes struggled with hers; he was easily thrown. But she had the regulation feminine foible of charity, he reassured himself, by her answer.