Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

29 страница из 108

Her mischievous and childlike expression, her imperturbable way of looking at him, the childish lisp with which she pronounced certain words, all had a certain fascination for the engineer.

“She’s a child,” he told himself. “Her husband is right about that. She has all the tricks of the dolls that society turns out—and she must be fearfully expensive! But, underneath all this, there is probably a very simple woman....”

When he was not with her, however, he was less optimistic about his friend’s wife, and smiled somewhat ironically at the latter’s credulity. Who was this woman? Where had Torre met her?

He knew concerning her only what his friend had told him. As to that distinguished functionary of the Czar’s court, her deceased husband, it was difficult to gather just what the nature of his services had been, perhaps because they had been so numerous! He had, it seemed, been Grand Marshal of the court; then again, he had been merely a general. But when it came to remarkable ancestry, no one could surpass Elena’s father. Torre Bianca delighted to repeat his wife’s statements concerning a host of personages of the Russian court, many of them great ladies, who had added the glory of a love affair with the Emperor to their other distinctions—yes, all these celebrities were relatives of Elena’s. He had never seen any of them because they had died a long time ago, or else they lived on their estates way off in Siberia somewhere.