"Byron, and Jerome K. Jerome?" I suggested.
I asked whether he had made Mrs. Lennox's acquaintance. Yes, they had talked a little.
"Aunt Netty talked to him about Tolstoi. Tolstoi is one of Mr. Rudd's stock topics."
I said I supposed she had retailed Rudd's views on the Russian. Was he astonished?
"Not a bit. I could see he had heard it all before," she said. "He was angelic. He shook his ears now and then like an Airedale terrier. Aunt Netty doesn't want him. Mr. Rudd is enough for her and she is enjoying herself. She always finds someone here. Last year it was a composer."
"Does Princess Kouragine know him?" I asked.
No, she didn't. She had never met him, but she knew of him.
I asked what Mr. Rudd thought about Princess Kouragine.
"Mr. Rudd and Aunt Netty discuss her for hours. He has theories about her. He began by saying she had the Slav indifference. Then Aunt Netty said she was French. But Mr. Rudd said it was catching. People who lived in Ireland became Irish, and people who lived in Russia became Russian. Then Aunt Netty said Princess Kouragine had lived in France and Italy. Mr. Rudd said she had caught the microbe, and that she was a woman who lived only by half-hours. He meant she was only alive for half-an-hour at a time."
At that moment someone walked up the path.
"Here is Monsieur Kranitski," she said. She introduced us.
"I have been walking to the end of the park," he said. "It is curious, but that side of the park with the dry lawn-tennis court, those birch trees and some straggling fir trees on the hill and the long grass, reminds me of a Russian garden which I used to know very well."
I said that when people had described that same spot to me I had imagined it like the descriptions of places in Tourgenev's books.
I said it was a wonderful tribute to an author's powers that he could make the character of a landscape plain, not only to a person who had never been in his country, but even to a blind man.
Kranitski said that Tourgenev described gardens very well, and a particular kind of Russian landscape. "What I call the orthodox kind. I hear James Rudd, the writer, is staying here. He has a gift for describing places: Italian villages, journeys in France, little canals at Venice, the Campagna."