The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke in on her musings.
'I have been asleep!' she cried, as she rose out of her deep chair and came forth into the moonlight. 'Pray forgive me, Wanda. You will have all that drowsy water running and tumbling all over the place; it makes one think of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week; there are the gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the eternal accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria; could you not drain it, divert it, send it underground--silence it somehow?'
'When you can keep the Neva flowing at New Year, perhaps I shall be able. But I would not if I could. I have had all that water about me from babyhood; when I am away from the sound of it I feel as if some hand had woolled up my ears.'
'That is what I feel when I am away from the noise of the streets. Oh, Wanda! to think that you can do utterly as you like and yet do not like to have the sea of light of the Champs-Élysées or the Graben before your eyes, rather than that gliding, dusky water!'
'The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it and Nature's; perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see God's.'
'That is not living, my dear, it is dreaming.'
'Oh, no, my life is very real; it is as real as light to darkness, it is absolute prose.'
'Make it poetry then; that is very easy.'
'Poetry is to the poetical; I am by no means poetical. My stud-book, my stewards' ledgers, my bankers' accounts, form the chief of my literature; you know I am a practical farmer.'
'I know you are one of the most beautiful and one of the richest women in Europe, and you live as if you were fifty years old, ugly, and _dévote_; all this will grow on you. In a few years' time you will be a hermit, a prude, an ascetic. You will found a new order, and be canonised after death.'
'My aunt is afraid that I shall die a freethinker. It is hard to please every one,' replied the Countess Wanda, with unruffled good humour. 'It is poetical people who found religious orders, enthusiasts, visionaries; I wish I were one of them. But I am not. The utmost I can do is to follow George Herbert's precept and sweep my own little chambers, so that this sweeping may be in some sort a duty done.'