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Updated: June 4, 2025
She bowed, and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response, there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing a something defiantly repellent which filled Diana with a sudden sense of dislike, almost of fear. It was as though the sun had all at once gone behind a cloud. The Baroni's voice fell on her ears, and the disagreeable tension snapped. "A rivederci, little singing-bird.
Diana, accustomed to the trained perfection of Olga Lermontof, found herself considerably handicapped, and her rendering of the song in question, Saint-Saens' Amour, viens aider, left a good deal to be desired in consequence a fact of which no one was more conscious than she herself. But the voice!
But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a cat. Diana spoke again nervously. "Are you angry with me?" "Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see what you're doing?" "What I'm doing?" repeated Diana.
Consequently we are obliged to imitate others, whether we like it or no." "'We are ill, says Lermontof, and I agree with him. But we are ill because we have only half become Europeans. With that which has wounded us we must be cured." In reality, all peoples are alike; only introduce good institutions, and the affair is settled. Those institutions will modify that life itself."
A week after her visit to Somervell Street, the thing which Diana had dreaded came to pass. She was attending a reception at the French Embassy, and as she made her way through the crowded rooms, followed by Olga Lermontof who frequently added to the duties of accompanist those of dame de compagnie to the great prima donna she came suddenly face to face with Max.
"But you must meet to-day," she said imperiously. "You must! To-morrow it will be too late." "Too late? How too late?" Miss Lermontof hesitated a moment. Then she said quietly: "I happen to know that Max is leaving England to-night." Diana shrugged her shoulders. "Well, he will come back, I suppose." The other looked at her curiously. "Diana, what has come to you?
Half an hour later Diana descended to the big music-room, where she usually rehearsed, to find Olga Lermontof already awaiting her there. By a sheer effort of will she had fought down the storm of emotion which had threatened to overwhelm her, and now, as she greeted her accompanist, she was quite cool and composed, though rather pale and with tired shadows beneath her eyes.
As he held the door open for her to pass out into the street, some one ran quickly up the steps, pausing on the topmost. "Ha, Olga!" exclaimed Baroni, beaming. "You haf returned just too late to hear Mees Quentin. But you will play for her many times yet." Then, turning to Diana, he added by way of introduction: "This is my accompanist, Mees Lermontof."
"I ought not to have asked you. Good-bye, signor." But Diana's loyalty was hard put to it to fight the newly awakened jealousy that was stirring in her heart, and it seemed as though just now everything and everybody combined to add fuel to the fire, for, only a few days later, when Miss Lermontof came to Lilac Lodge to practise with Diana, she, too, added her quota of disturbing comment.
Indeed Diana had accused her of it, only to be met with a quiet negative. "No," she had replied serenely. "I don't dislike him. But I disapprove of much that he does." "He is rather an attractive person," Diana ventured tentatively. Olga Lermontof shot a keen glance at her. "Well, I advise you not to give him your friendship," she said, "or" sneeringly "anything of greater value."
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