'Olga will take pity on our solitude,' said Wanda von Szalras to her aunt. 'I have not seen her for four years, but I imagine she is little changed.'
The Princess read the letter, frowning and pursing her lips together in pretty rebuke as she came to the name of Cochonette.
'They have indeed lost all dignity,' she said with a sigh; 'and something more than dignity also. Olga was always frivolous.'
'All her _monde_ is; not she more than another.'
'You were very unjust, you see, to M. de Sabran; he pays you the compliment of following your counsels.'
Wanda von Szalras rose a little impatiently. 'He had better have followed them before he broke the bank at Monaco. It is an odd sort of notoriety with which to attract the pious and taciturn Bretons; and when he was here he had no convictions. I suppose he picked them up with the gold pieces at the tables!'
Olga, Countess Brancka, _née_ Countess Seriatine, of a noble Russian family, had been married at sixteen to the young Gela von Szalras, who, a few months after his bridal, had been shot dead on the battlefield of Solferino.
After scarce a year of mourning she had fascinated the brother of Egon Vàsàrhely, a mere youth who bore the title of Count Brancka. There had been long and bitter opposition made to the new alliance on the part of both families, on account of the consanguinity between Stefan Brancka and her dead lord. But opposition had only increased the ardour of the young man and the young widow; they had borne down all resistance, procured all dispensations, had been wedded, and in a year's time had both wished the deed undone. Both were extravagant, capricious, self-indulgent, and unreasonable; their two egotisms were in a perpetual collision. They met but seldom, and never met without quarrelling violently. The only issue of their union was two little, fantastic, artificial fairies who were called respectively Mila and Marie.
At the time of the marriage of the Branckas, Wanda had been too young to share in opposition to it; but the infidelity to her brother's memory had offended and wounded her deeply, and in her inmost heart she had never pardoned it, though the wife of Stefan Brancka had been a passing guest at Hohenszalras, where, had Count Gela lived, she would have reigned as sovereign mistress. That his sister reigned there in her stead the Countess Olga resented keenly and persistently. Her own portion of the wealth of the Szalras had been forfeited under her first marriage contract by her subsequent alliance. But she never failed to persuade herself that her exclusion from every share in that magnificent fortune was a deep wrong done to herself, and she looked upon Wanda von Szalras as the doer of that wrong.