Meeting her candid, clear, affectionate gaze, Nikolai managed to summon up a smile of his own that was quite grandfatherly. CHAPTER XLIX Joan was not the judge of human nature she fancied herself if she believed that a disparity in age would render gossip innocuous. The disparity was not as apparent as she believed. Nikolai was, in his dark, impassive way, a singularly handsome man, and the stories of his early ghetto life and later experiences made of him a romantic figure to more eyes than Joan's. In vain the Jabberwocks rallied around her to a girl. In vain Effie May, whose shrewd ears heard usually whatever was to be heard, even in her retirement, casually spread abroad the story of Mr. Nikolai's devotion to the first Mrs. Darcy. Joan's attitude was discouraging to her most loyal friends. She seemed quite unaware that she was being defended and rallied around. It rather relieved her when invitations began to dwindle in number; she was thus saved the trouble of declining them. She entered into their growing solitude _a deux_ with the same single-mindedness she had brought to bear upon her frivolous period, her domestic period, and her brief career of publicity; being one of those natures which can do only one thing at a time, and that very hard. When she thought about their relationship at all, it rather pleased her to fancy that she was playing Mrs. Thrale to Nikolai's Dr. Johnson. Unfortunately the people about her were for the most part unaware of this classic relationship; and had they known of it would have doubtless regarded it with one eye knowingly closed. Much of the town's attention fastened itself upon Archibald. Scandals there had been before this, even in its upper circles; but they had maintained hitherto a decent surreptitiousness, had veiled themselves beneath a more or less transparent cover of secrecy, until some climax occurred in the way of pistol-shot or divorce-proceeding. The _tertium quid_, acknowledged and accepted, was new to the experience of Louisville; and very interesting. Meanwhile Stefan Nikolai, all unconscious of the stimulus he was offering to general conversation, spent all of his free hours with Joan, having long since faced and discounted the risk of it so far as he was concerned. The risk Joan herself might run appeared to his experience negligible. He had never even in his youth attracted women as less intellectual men attract them. Doubtless even had he been aware of the town's talk it would not have troubled him. For all his knowledge of humanity, he was no man of the world, in the accepted sense of the term. He lived too much beyond it to attach great importance to its opinion. In only one person he recognized any right of criticism. That was Joan's husband, with whom long since he had come to an understanding. It is a pity that neither Joan nor Joan's world ever came to know of this understanding, which would have added to the affair a distinct flavor.