'Duty! She should have her proper moments of audience, like the steward, the piqueur, the secretary, and other necessary and disagreeable people; that is to say, if she really exist. Monsignore Melville evidently is in the habit of listening to her.'
'I may say with Josef II., "C'est mon métier à moi,"' said Melville, with good humour. 'But believe me, Princess, it is not duty which prevents repose; it is far more often worry, the hateful familiar of all modern life. Worry takes a million forms; very often it is dressed up as pleasure, and perhaps in that shape is more distressing than in any other.'
'Yes, the age has invented nothing that does not result in worry. Only look at the torture to diplomatists from the telegrams,' replied Madame Napraxine, while she tendered him a cigar. 'In other years an ambassador had some pleasure in disentangling a delicate and intricate embroglio, some chance of making a great name by his skill in negotiation. An able man was let alone to mingle his _suaviter_ and his _fortiter_, his honey and his aloes, as he thought fit; his knowledge of the country to which he was accredited was trusted to and appreciated; nowadays, telegrams rain in on him with every hour; he is allowed no initiative, no independent action; he is dictated to and interfered with by his home government, and cypher messages torture him at every step. What is the consequence? That there is scarcely a diplomatist left in Europe--they are only delegates. Where there is one, he is incessantly controlled, hindered, and annoyed, and all his counsels are disregarded. Meanwhile the world's only kind of peace is a permanent armed truce. But let us go into the garden.'
When Nadège Fedorevna, Countess Platoff, known to all her friends by the _petit nom_ of Nadine, had reached her sixteenth year she had the look of a hothouse gardenia, so white was her skin and so spiritual her aspect, whilst her slender form had all the grace of a flower balancing itself on a fragile stalk in a south wind. That ethereality, that exquisite delicacy, as of something far too fair and evanescent for man's rude touch, fascinated into a timid and adoring passion a heavily-built and clumsy cuirassier of the Imperial Guard, who was also one of the greatest nobles written in the Velvet Book of Russia--Platon Nicholaivitch, head of the mighty family of Napraxine. He was eight-and-twenty years old, immeasurably rich, popular with his sovereign, a good soldier, and an exceedingly amiable man. He laid his heart and everything he possessed at the feet of this exquisite and disdainful child when he saw her at her father's embassy in Vienna one fateful April day.