Ermelang said: “A being like you exists in so elemental a fashion that any image is as negligible in comparison as the shadow of a thing when the sun is at its zenith.” “You are subtle. Yet images persist. I have so great a faith in your vision that I should like you to tell me whether I am really so changed as those friends assert who knew me in my Parisian days. I laugh at them; but in my laughter there is a little rebellion of my vanity and a little fear of withering and fading. Don’t say anything; a contradiction would be trivial. Tell me, above all, how you came to be travelling in Russia, and what you have seen and heard and experienced.” “I have experienced very little. The total impression has been so unforgettable that details have faded into insignificance. Various difficulties made Paris unpleasant to me, and the Princess Valuyeff offered me a refuge on her estate near Petrograd. Now I must return to the West--to Europe, as the Russians mockingly say. And they are right. For I must leave my spiritual home-land, and people who were close to me, although I did not know them, and a loneliness full of melody and presage, and return to senseless noise and confusion and isolation. I have spoken to Tolstoi and to Pobiedonostzev; I have been to the fair at Nijni-Novgorod, and been driven across the steppe in a troika. And about all--the people and the landscape--there is a breath of innocence and of the times to come, of mystery and of power.” Eva had not listened very attentively. The hymns to Russia, intoned by wayfaring literary men and observers, began seriously to bore her. She made a faintly wry mouth. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a world all its own,” and held out her lovely hands toward the warmth of the fire. It seemed to Ermelang that she had never, in the old days, let some one to whom she was talking thus drift out of the circle of her mind. He felt that his words had had no friendly reception. He became diffident and silent. Guardedly he observed her with his inner eye, which was truly austere. He saw the change of which she had spoken, and recorded the image as she had demanded. The oval of her face had acquired a line hardened as by the will. Nothing was left of goodness in it, little of serenity. An almost harsh determination was about her mouth. There were losses, too. Shadows lay on her temples and under her lids. Her body still betrayed her lordship over it, precisely in its flowing ease, its expansion and repose, such as one sees in wildcats. Ermelang had heard that she toiled unceasingly, spending six to seven hours a day in practice, as in the years of her apprenticeship. The result was evident in the satiation with rhythm and grace which her limbs and joints showed and her perfect control of them.