“I love them,” answered Netty, and she walked on rather hurriedly to the
next shop.
“You would naturally.”
“Why?” asked Netty, looking with a curious interest at the packets of
tea in the Russian shop next to Ulrich's.
“Is it not the correct thing to select the flower that matches the
eyes?”
“It is very kind of you to say that,” said Netty, in a voice
half-afraid, half-reproachful.
“It is very kind of Heaven to give you such eyes,” answered Martin,
gayly. He was more and more surprised to find how easy it was to get on
with Netty, whom he seemed to have known all his life. Like many lively
persons, he rather liked a companion to possess a vein of gravity, and
this Netty seemed to have. He was sure that she was religious and very
good.
“You know,” said Netty, hastily, and ignoring his remark, “I am much
interested in Poland. It is such a romantic country. People have done
such great things, have they not, in Poland? I mean the nobles--and the
poor peasants, too in their small way, I suppose?”
“The nobles have come to great grief in Poland--that is all,” replied
Martin, with a short laugh.
“And it is so sad,” said Netty, with a shake of the head; “but I am
sure it will all come right some day. Do you think so? I am sure you are
interested in Poland--you and your sister and your father.”
“We are supposed to be,” admitted Martin. “But no one cares for Poland
now, I am afraid. The rest of the world has other things to think of,
and, in England and America, Poland is forgotten now--and her history,
which is the saddest history of any nation in the world.”
“But I am sure you are wrong there,” said Netty, earnestly. “I know a
great number of people who are sorry for the Poles and interested in
them.”
“Are you?” asked Martin, looking down at her.
“Yes,” she replied, with downcast eyes. “Come,” she said, after a pause,
with a sort of effort, “we must not stand in front of this shop any
longer.”
“Especially,” he said, with a laugh, as he followed her, “as it is a
Russian shop. Wherever you see tea and articles of religion mixed up in
a window, that is a Russian shop, and if you sympathize with Poland you
will not go into it. There are, on the other hand, plenty of shops in
Warsaw where they will not serve Russians. It is to those shops that you
must go.”
Netty looked at him doubtfully.
“I am quite serious,” he said. “We must fight with what weapons we
have.”
“Yes,” she answered, indicating the shops, “these people, but not you.
You are a prince, and they cannot touch you. They would not dare to take
anything from you.”
“Because there is nothing to take,” laughed Martin, gayly; “we were
ruined long ago. They took everything there was to take in 1830, when
my father was a boy. He could not work for his living, and I may not
either; so I am a prince without a halfpenny to call his own.”
“I am so sorry!” she said, in a soft voice, and, indeed, she looked it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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