The courier at once sought the hotel office and registered as follows:
Her Highness Princess Zara de Echeveria
and suite, St. Petersburg.
And when his attention was called to the fact that the names of the
entire party were required, he shrugged his shoulders and announced: "I regret, sir, that I do not remember the names of all the persons who
comprise her highness' suite, but I will supply you presently with a
list of them."
In the parlor of the apartments occupied by the princess, her maid was
removing the furs and wraps and making her mistress comfortable, for
there is inevitably after a sea voyage, a few hours of fatigue which
nothing but restful quiet and utter idleness will overcome; and
therefore an hour or more later, when a visiting card was taken to the
princess she did not even give herself the trouble to examine it, but
said while she peered through half closed eyelids: "Whoever it is, Orloff, say that I will not receive until four this
afternoon."
Down below, in the office of the hotel, the gentleman who had sent up
the card and who received this message in reply to it, shrugged his
shoulders, glanced at the face of his watch to discover that it was yet
barely noon-time, crossed to the book stall where he secured something
to read and thereby while away the time, and then having sought a
comfortable chair in a secluded corner deposited himself in it with an
air of finality which indicated that he had no idea of departing from
the hotel until after he had secured the solicited audience.
At four he sent a second card to the princess; at half past four he was
admitted to her presence.
If the eyes of that curious throng of people who had watched her
arrival at the steamship pier could have seen her then, when this man
who had waited so long was shown into her presence, they would have
been amply repaid for their admiring curiosity concerning her. It is
trite to speak of a woman as being radiantly beautiful, commonplace to
refer to it at all, save by implication, since feminine beauty is a
composite attribute, vague and indefinable, and should possess no
single quality to individualize it. Beauty such as that possessed by
Princess Zara can neither be defined nor described. It is the tout
ensemble of her presence and her personal charm.
Zara de Echeveria needed no adornment to emphasize the attractions of
her gorgeous self. She was one of those rare women who are rendered
more attractive by the absence of all ornament and her dark eyes were
more luminous and brilliant than any jewel she might have worn. Her
gown, though rich, was simplicity itself, and inasmuch as her servants
had found time during the hours since their arrival, to decorate the
rooms according to the princess' tastes, she was surrounded by much the
same settings that would have been contained in her own palatial home
at St. Petersburg. When it is said that she was barely twenty-five in
years; that her father had been a Spanish nobleman in the diplomatic
service at the Russian capital, and that her mother was of royal birth,
we have an explanation for the exquisitely fascinating and almost
voluptuous qualities of her beauty, as well as for her royal manner of
command.