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Updated: June 1, 2025
You, who are a great artist, who have labored through poverty, through injustice, through calumny, through the jealousy of friends and the libel of enemies, and have conquered them all, you know well in your heart that great ignorance, great vanity, great self-indulgence, belong not to the characters of the truly great. Oh I, I, Irina, the outcast, know that well! Did I tempt you?
Irina's history, well known to every one except her lover, kept this strange romance always vivid, always replete with dramatic possibilities. Meantime, however, during the first weeks, the small ménage prospered amazingly. Irina had been living for some time among cloying luxuries.
There followed silence: a silence so long that, almost for the first time in her career, Irina began to wonder if she could have miscalculated the strength of her hold on this boy for whom she had conceived so violent a passion. Had she, indeed, been able, at that moment, to read the depths of Joseph's mind, her wonder would probably have been augmented to fear.
There Sergius and Irina dwelt, in circumstances a little better than those of their friends. They kept the rent of their rooms paid; and, moreover, it was a rare thing for a starving youth to drop in on them and find their samovar cold, or their welcome unready.
While the vision floated about the room examining the various sketches and studies scattered over the walls, Joseph managed to keep his head sufficiently to go through the necessary preliminaries with his Excellency, who, a trifle nervous about his situation, and convinced that no danger to his possession could possibly accrue through this shy and boyish young artist, so plainly in the throes of poverty, was much relieved when the matter of size and price had been settled and he could take his departure, leaving Irina to her first sitting.
At eight o'clock in the evening my uncle, his family, Irina, the dogs, the rats that live in the storeroom, the rabbits were fast asleep. There was nothing for it but to go to bed too. I sleep on the drawing-room sofa.
And the two of them were at opposite ends of the feminine world; for one was the Princess Nathalie Féodoreff; the other, a white-faced, worn-looking, plainly dressed woman, seemingly of the lower middle-class, was Irina Petrovna; finished, now, with the active degradations of her life; living in a great silence, upon the scanty savings of her years of mad extravagance.
Joseph was gone: out into Moscow, into the cruelty of the frozen city, penniless, friendless, perhaps still mad! Nor did he ever reappear, in any of his old haunts. Search proved fruitless. Irina had done her work thoroughly. Every effort failed to bring the wanderer up out of the dark unknown.
Ivan turned to obey her, and, an instant later, found himself alone. Irina had disappeared into the adjoining bedroom, whence she emerged, in a very short space of time, clad in a tea-gown that bore the air and the name of the greatest of Parisian couturières.
Intoxicated by the success which no one had as yet explained to him, Joseph began suddenly to discover spending-powers of his own. After that, work as he would, a Raphael could scarcely have kept his ménage out of debt. Irina, watching her lover minutely, and perfectly foreseeing the forthcoming exigencies of the situation, was quite prepared when Joseph came to her for advice.
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