Jack Courtray was a thoroughly good all-around sportsman, and had an
immense success with women as a rule. His methods were primitive and
direct. When not hunting or shooting, he went straight to the point
with a beautiful simplicity unhampered by sentiment, and then when
wearied with one woman, moved on to the next.
He was a tremendously good fellow every man said. Just a natural animal
creature, whom grooming and polishing in the family for some hundred or
so of years had made into a gentleman.
He was as ignorant as he could well be. To him the geography of the
world meant different places for sport. India represented tigers and
elephants. It had no towns or histories that mattered, it had jungles
and forests. Africa said lions. Austria, chamois--and Russia, bears!
Women were either sisters, or old friends and jolly comrades--like
Tamara. Or they came under the category of sport. A lesser sport, to be
indulged in when the rarer beasts were not obtainable for his gun--but
still sport!
He found himself in a delightful milieu. The prospect of certain bears
in the near future--a dear old friend to frolic with in the immediate
present, and the problematic joys of a possible affair to be indulged
in meanwhile. No wonder he was in the best of spirits, and when Tamara,
without arrière pensée, took the empty place at his side, he
bent over her and filled her plate with the thinnest ham he had been
able to cut, with all the apparent air of a devoted lover. And if she
had looked up she would have seen that the Prince suddenly had begun to
watch her with a fierceness in his eyes.
"This is a jolly place," Jack Courtray said. He had just the faintest
lisp, which sounded rather attractive, and Tamara, after the storms and
emotions of the past few days, found a distinct pleasure and rest in
his obviousness.
It is an ill wind which blows no one any good, for presently the Prince
turned and devoted himself to Tatiane Shébanoff.
She was quite the prettiest of all this little clique, petite and fair
and sweet. Divorced from a brute of a husband a year or so ago, and now
married to an elderly Prince.
And she loved Gritzko with passion, and while she was silent about it,
her many friends told him so.
For his part he remained unconcerned, and sometimes troubled himself
about her, and sometimes not.
And so the evening wore on, and apparently it had no distinct sign that
it was to be one of the finger-posts of fate.