son it still had all the misery of
perennial newness.

Nevertheless, despite the deadening of time, the mother-yearning over
her child's loneliness never wholly left the poor Princess. In the case
of the ball, for instance, if her labor for its success, if the care
spent on its details, the summoning of Caroline from Petersburg, the
unwonted extravagance of her Paris costume, had one and all been
suggested by her husband, they had been carried out by her not for his
sake nor for her own; but for the sake of all that it might afterwards
accomplish for Ivan. Once she and Prince Michael were actually accepted,
their son must naturally find his new place. Thus, for weeks before the
event, she had seen Ivan, in her dreams, taking his place among as yet
unknown companions: outstripping all rivals in brilliance and in
popularity. And after the ball, though some of her dreary disappointment
had, unquestionably, been for herself, the better part of it, also, had
been for the child whose protector she had always been. It was almost a
pity that she was so careful never to drag him into the shadows of her
life. Had he once surmised them, the two, mother and son, might have
found a companionship in sorrow that would mean more to them both than
all their separate, painful pretence of happiness--or contentment.

Everything considered, Ivan saw much of his mother; and next to nothing
of his father. And because of the apparent mystery with which the Prince
was surrounded before his son: his mother's reluctance in speaking of
him, the serfs' sign for avoidance of the evil-eye when the master was
mentioned, even Monsieur Ludmillo's careful reticence on the subject,
Michael came, by degrees, to play a foremost part in his son's
imaginings: a part at once heroic and terrible. Ivan knew very well that
his father was not a good man: that he frequently did hateful things
that seriously hurt his mother. Nevertheless, there was a strong
fascination about such a personality. Gigantic, fierce, wild, darkly
omniscient, mysteriously terrible, he stalked in a mental lime-light
through Ivan's dreams. His existence, in the boyish imagination, was
more adventurous than that of any hero of Scheherazade. And perhaps the
greatest charm of all was the fact that, in all seriousness, Ivan
believed his father actually capable of most of the deeds he arranged in
his thoughts.

The boy had been told of his father's importance to the Government; his
power in