Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/43

Rh fuss of the Court—in my view a somewhat injudicious step to have taken considering all things.

Princess Cherwachidze, née Baronne de Nicolay, my father's first cousin, is small and slender, very refined and fragile, so fragile indeed that one is almost afraid of breaking her when embracing her, but possessing in her heart an unfathomable depth of kindness and devotion.

My dear little aunt—Aunt Maka, as I called her—seemed to be in love, so much in love with her husband that morning and night, especially when at Petrograd, she rushed off as fast as she could cover the ground to the telephone to converse with the object of her adoration, who was always in waiting on his Imperial Mistress wherever she happened to be—Gatchina, Peterhof, Tsarskoe-Celo or Petrograd, at the Anitschkoff Palace. The conversation was always the same and in her soft emotional voice she commenced:—

"Comment vas-tu?" The reply I never caught. "Allons tant mieux." Idem. "Tu vas venir aujourd'hui, n'est-ce pas?" I guessed the reply to be in the negative. "Et demain?" Again in the negative. "Alors tu me diras. Au revoir." Then it was over. He was not often able to respond to these summonses.

She seemed quite satisfied to know that her spouse was in good health—there was no alternative—and then again would rush off across the drawing-rooms back to her comfortable study where she always had a vast correspondence to attend to, and to reply to in that beautiful