CHAPTER V

COUNTESS STENO

A woman less courageous than the Countess, less capable of looking a
situation in the face and of advancing to it, such an evening would have
marked the prelude to one of those nights of insomnia when the mind
exhausts in advance all the agonies of probable danger. Countess Steno
did not know what weakness and fear were.

A creature of energy and of action, who felt herself to be above all
danger, she attached no meaning to the word uneasiness. So she slept,
on the night which followed that soiree, a sleep as profound,
as refreshing, as if Gorka had never returned with vengeance in his
heart, with threats in his eyes. Toward ten o'clock the following
morning, she was in the tiny salon, or rather, the office adjoining her
bedroom, examining several accounts brought by one of her men of
business. Rising at seven o'clock, according to her custom, she had
taken the cold bath in which, in summer as well as winter, she daily
quickened her blood. She had breakfasted, 'a l'anglaise', following the
rule to which she claimed to owe the preservation of her digestion, upon
eggs, cold meat, and tea. She had made her complicated toilette, had
visited her daughter to ascertain how she had slept, had written five
letters, for her cosmopolitan salon compelled her to carry on an immense
correspondence, which radiated between Cairo and New York,
St. Petersburg and Bombay, taking in Munich, London, and Madeira,
and she was as faithful in friendship as she was inconstant in love.