Page:Achmed Abdullah--Wings.djvu/61

Rh his great ancestry which partook of Rurik Vikings and Tartar Khans of the Silver Horde, and congratulating the legitimist clique of the Faubourg on the arrival of such a thumping blue-blood—and tossed the gossip ball to its editorial neighbor, the Vie Parisienne.

The latter weekly acted up splendidly. It printed a rotogravure portrait of the prince in a border of cupids, chorus girls, three-horse troikas, sacks of gold, and grisettes; mentioned that he was young, a bachelor, and immensely wealthy; and added that as yet he had not thrown his scented handkerchief at the feet of either mondaine or demi-mondaine.

"Why?"—demanded the final, tart, succinct word of the page in four-inch Gothic.

The next move was up to the Revue Diplomatique. In its personality column, entitled "Mustard and Cress," and signed "Junior Attaché," it alluded to the fact that even in his native Russia the prince was considered an engima [sic]. "The Sphinx" was the nickname by which he was known in the salons of Moscow and Petrograd.

And justly.

For he had no intimate friends; he had used all sorts of political influence until he was finally ex-