“I’d go and dress only I left my keys at Soler’s. I shall have to sleep out to-night, I shan’t be able to get my keys till the morning.” Suddenly in a new tone, the equivalent of a vulgar wink: “Ah, this life, Fräulein! It’s accidents often separate one from one’s ‘smokkin’ for days; sometimes weeks. My ‘smokkin’ leads a very independent life. Sometimes it’s with me, sometimes not. It was a very expensive suit. That has been its downfall.” “Do you mean you haven’t got a _frac_?” “No, not that. You misunderstand me.” He reflected a moment. “Ah, before I forget, Fräulein Lipmann! If you still want to know about that little matter: I wrote to my mother the other day. In her reply she tells me that Professor Heymann is still at Karlsruhe. He will probably take a class in the country this summer as usual. The remainder of the party!” he added as the bell again rang. He could not be brutally prevented from accompanying them to the dance. But with his remark about Volker he felt as safe as if he had a ticket or _passe-partout_ in his pocket. Kreisler was standing alone nearly in the middle of the room, his arms folded and staring at the door. He would use this fictitious authority and licence to its utmost limit. Some of the others were conscious of something unusual in his presence besides his dress and the disorder even of that. They supposed he had been drinking. There were rustlings and laughter in the hall for some minutes. Social facts, abstracted in this manner, appealed to the mind with the strangeness of masks, each sense, isolated, being like a mask on another. Anastasya appeared. She came out of that social flutter astonishingly inapposite, like a mask come to life. The little fanfare of welcome continued. She was much more outrageous than Kreisler could ever hope to be: bespangled and accoutred like a princess of the household of Peter the Great jangling and rumbling like a savage showman through abashed capitals. Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress. She would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns on a stream. “We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.” Tarr lectured her later, to which she replied: “But they had such prodigious lives! I don’t like being anything out and out, life is so varied. I like wearing a dress with which I can enter into any _milieu_ or circumstances. That is the only real self worth the name.” Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that. Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility. Even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state. * * * * *