their way alone
through the lanes:--

"That woman has a lot of energy in her! It shows in her movements--she
has personality, character."

Milly had never heard him say as much as that about any other woman, and
she wondered how such large generalizations could be made from the fact
that a woman was fitting up an old house. She was vaguely jealous, as
any woman might be, that her husband should choose just those qualities
for commendation.

She went often thereafter to the _manoir_ while her husband was
painting, and marvelled at the ease and sureness with which the Russian
installed herself, her only helpers being the stupid peasants, who
seemed to understand no language but their own jargon.

"I'm used to driving cattle," the Russian explained to Milly with a
little laugh. "You see my father had estates in southern Russia, and I
lived there a good deal before I was married."

"They must be quite important," Milly reported to Jack. "They seem to
know people all over Europe."

"Oh, that's Russian," he explained.

"And Baron Saratoff is away on a most important mission."

"Absent husbands ought to be!"

"I don't believe she cares for him much."

"How can you tell that so soon?"

"Oh!" Milly replied vaguely, as if that were a point few women could
keep from other women.

As a matter of fact the Russian lady had given Milly some new and
startling lights upon marriage.

"I am," she told Milly in her precise speech, "what you call the 'show
wife.' I go to parties, to court--all rigged up,--you say rigged,
no?--dressed then very grand with my jewels. And I have children, see!"
She pointed to the healthy little Saratoffs playing in the garden. "My
husband goes away on his business--makes long journeys. He amuses
himself. When he comes back, I have a child,--_voila_." She laughed and
showed her white teeth. "But I have my vacations sometimes, too, like
this."

Milly thought that the Russian type of marriage must be much inferior to
the American, at least the Chicago variety, where if there was any going
away from home, it was usually the wife who went, and she confided this
opinion to Jack, who said with a laugh:--

"Oh, you can never understand these foreigners. She's probably like
every one else.... But I'd like to paint her and get that smile of
hers."

"Why don't you ask her?"

"Perhaps I will one of these days."

* * * * *

The hotel gradually filled up. The great p