The Princess Sonia — Key Ideas to Explore

ent tongues; and they were such a mixture of aristocrats and plebeians--some were so afraid of patronizing and others of being patronized,--that the conditions generally were such as were opposed to much mixing. Talking was forbidden during work-hours, except the little absolutely necessary whispering; and in the intermission at noon the princess always went away for lunch, and sometimes did not return. Martha, too, went to her mother’s apartment for the midday meal, though nothing ever prevented her from returning. Some of the students had chums, with whom they chatted glibly in the cloak-room; but as a rule, these intimacies had been formed outside.

Martha Keene was a girl who would never have made the first advance toward an acquaintance with any one; for, although she had passed her twentieth year, she was incorrigibly shy. This reserve of manner was so evident that it discouraged advances from others. She knew this and regretted it, but could not help it.

It had pleased Martha very much when, on a single occasion, this wall of isolation which she had built around herself had been broken through by a little American chatterbox, who had rattled away to her for ten minutes one day as she was waiting for her carriage in the cloak-room. This had been soon after her entrance at Etienne’s, and her voluble country-woman had vanished from the horizon the next day; but in that one talk she had got almost all the knowledge of the atelier which she possessed.

Her informant had told her that the students were not supposed to inquire about one another at all, the ideal of the atelier being a place where high and low alike could lay aside their disabilities and get the benefits of the common workshop. She added that there had been several personages of importance studying there since she herself had been a student, but that she had always heard of it from the outside, and they had generally left before she had identified them. “I spotted the princess, though,” she had said. “As soon as I heard that there was a Russian princess studying here, I picked her out. Do you know which one she is?” Martha had answered, “The lady in the red blouse”--a guess at once confirmed. “Isn’t she stunning?” her companion had gone on; “I’m dying to speak to her! If she were not a princess, I’d have done it long ago. I can’t go the Russian; but no doubt she speaks every language. Russians always do.” At this point of the conversation the lady herself had come into the cloak-room. A neat French maid who was

in waiting had come forward, and held out her lady’s wrap, a magnificent sable thing, in which the beautiful creature had quickly infolded herself, and left the room, the two girls meanwhile making a tremendous effort to cover their breathless interest by an air of unconsciousness.

Ever since that day--indeed, even before it--Martha had been a silent worshiper at the shrine of the princess. She had a passionate love of beauty, and her heart, for all her grave and shy exterior, was packed as full of romance as it could hold. The discovery that this beautiful being was a princess--and a Russian princess, of all others--was meet food for this appetite for the romantic; and she dreamed by the hour about this young woman’s life, and wondered what it had been and was to be. She knew she could not be many years older than herself, and she wondered, with burning interest, whether she was or was not married. Sometimes she would hold to one opinion for days, and then something--a mere turn of expression, perhaps--would convert her to the opposite one. She wanted her to be unmarried, so that she might be free to construct from her imagination a beautiful future for her; and yet she dreaded to find out that she was married. There was certainly a look about the princess which contradicted Martha’s ideal of her as the possessor of a fair, unwritten life-page. Martha had watched her hands to see if she wore a wedding-ring; but those extraordinarily beautiful hands were either loaded down with jeweled gauds of antique workmanship or else quite ringless. Still, many married women were careless about wearing their wedding-rings, a thing which Martha herself could not comprehend; but she felt that this wonderful creature was removed as far as possible from her in both actuality and ideas.