steal upon anyone like that! How you startled
me!" she responded. "Please don't talk to me about the opera;
you know nothing about music. I'd better meet you on your own
ground, and talk about your majolica and engravings. Come now,
what treasure have you been buying lately at the old curiosity
shops?"

"Would you like me to show you? But you don't understand such
things."

"Oh, do show me! I've been learning about them at those--what's
their names?...the bankers...they've some splendid engravings.
They showed them to us."

"Why, have you been at the Schuetzburgs?" asked the hostess from
the samovar.

"Yes, _ma chere_. They asked my husband and me to dinner, and told
us the sauce at that dinner cost a hundred pounds," Princess
Myakaya said, speaking loudly, and conscious everyone was
listening; "and very nasty sauce it was, some green mess. We had
to ask them, and I made them sauce for eighteen pence, and
everybody was very much pleased with it. I can't run to
hundred-pound sauces."

"She's unique!" said the lady of the house.

"Marvelous!" said someone.

The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya's speeches was always
unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the
fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she
said simple things with some sense in them. In the society in
which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the
wittiest epigram. Princess Myakaya could never see why it had
that effect, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.

As everyone had been listening while Princess Myakaya spoke, and
so the conversation around the ambassador's wife had dropped,
Princess Betsy tried to bring the whole party together, and
turned to the ambassador's wife.

"Will you really not have tea? You should come over here by us."

"No, we're very happy here," the ambassador's wife responded with
a smile, and she went on with the conversation that had been
begun.

"It was a very agreeable conversation. They were criticizing the
Karenins, husband and wife.

"Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There's
something strange about her," said her friend.

"The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of
Alexey Vronsky," said the ambassador's wife.

"Well, what of it? There's a fable of Grimm's about a man
without a shadow, a man who's lost his shadow. And that's his
punishment for something. I never could understand how i