‘Perhaps you don’t want to run into Stremov? Let him and Alexei Alexandrovich be at loggerheads on some committee, that’s no concern of ours. But in society he’s the most amiable man I know and a passionate croquet player. You’ll see. And despite his ridiculous position as Liza’s aged wooer, you must see how he gets himself out of it! He’s very sweet. You don’t know Sappho Stolz? This is a new, a quite new, tone.’
While Betsy was saying all this, Anna sensed from her cheerful, intelligent look that she partly understood her position and was up to something. They were in the small drawing room.
‘Anyhow, I must write to Alexei,’ and Betsy sat down at the table, wrote a few lines and put them in an envelope. ‘I’m writing that he should come for dinner. I have one lady for dinner who is left without a man. See if it sounds convincing. Excuse me, I’ll leave you for a moment. Seal it, please, and send it off,’ she said from the door, ‘I must make some arrangements.’
Without a moment’s thought, Anna sat down at the table with Betsy’s letter and, without reading it, added at the bottom: ‘I must see you. Come to Vrede’s garden. I’ll be there at six o’clock.’ She sealed it, and Betsy, having returned, sent the letter off in her presence.
Over tea, which was brought to them on a tray-table in the cool small drawing room, the two women indeed engaged in a ‘cosy chat’, as Princess Tverskoy had promised, until the guests arrived. They discussed the people who were expected, and the conversation came to rest on Liza Merkalov.
‘She’s very sweet and I’ve always found her sympathetic,’ Anna said.
‘You ought to love her. She raves about you. Yesterday she came up to me after the race and was in despair at not finding you. She says you’re a real heroine from a novel and that if she were a man she would have committed a thousand follies for you. Stremov tells her she commits them anyway.’
‘But tell me, please, I never could understand,’ Anna said after some silence and in a tone which showed clearly that she was not putting an idle question, but that what she was asking was more important for her than it ought to be. ‘Tell me, please, what is her relation to Prince Kaluzhsky, the so-called Mishka? I’ve seldom met them. What is it?’
Betsy smiled with her eyes and looked attentively at Anna.
‘It’s the new way,’ she said. ‘They’ve all chosen this way. They’ve thrown their bonnets over the mills.w But there are different ways of throwing them over.’
‘Yes, but what is her relation to Kaluzhsky?’
Betsy unexpectedly laughed, gaily and irrepressibly, something that rarely happened with her.
‘You’re encroaching on Princess Miagky’s province. It’s the question of a terrible child.’x And Betsy obviously tried to restrain herself but failed and burst into the infectious laughter of people who laugh rarely. ‘You’ll have to ask them,’ she said through tears of laughter.
‘No, you’re laughing,’ said Anna, also involuntarily infected with laughter, ‘but I never could understand it. I don’t understand the husband’s role in it.’
‘The husband? Liza Merkalov’s husband carries rugs around for her and is always ready to be of service. And what else there is in fact, nobody wants to know. You see, in good society one doesn’t speak or even think of certain details of the toilette. It’s the same here.’
‘Will you be at Rolandaki’s fête?’ Anna asked, to change the subject.
‘I don’t think so,’ Betsy replied and began carefully filling the small, translucent cups with fragrant tea. Moving a cup towards Anna, she took out a slender cigarette, put it into a silver holder, and lit it.
‘So you see, I’m in a fortunate position,’ she began, no longer laughing, as she picked up her cup. ‘I understand you and I understand Liza. Liza is one of those naïve natures, like children, who don’t understand what’s good and what’s bad. At least she didn’t understand it when she was very young. And now she knows that this non-understanding becomes her. Now she may purposely not understand,’ Betsy spoke with a subtle smile, ‘but all the same it becomes her. You see, one and the same thing can be looked at tragically and be made into a torment, or can be looked at simply and even gaily. Perhaps you’re inclined to look at things too tragically.’
‘How I wish I knew others as I know myself,’ Anna said seriously and pensively. ‘Am I worse than others or better? Worse, I think.’
‘Terrible child, terrible child!’ Betsy repeated. ‘But here they are.’
XVIII
