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She watched
their naked antics at first with disapproval--what could you expect, she
would say, from Russians? Then she observed them eating raw crabs and
things. It struck her that they must be hungry. Being a lady of the
sentimental type, childless, and never so happy as when feeding or
mothering somebody, she took to sending them down baskets of food, or
carrying it herself. They were so poor, so far from their homes, so
picturesque in those red shirts and leathern belts!
Of late years Madame Steynlin had given up marrying, having at last,
after many broken hopes, definitely convinced herself that husbands
were only after her money. Rightly or wrongly, she wanted to be loved
for herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul. Even as the fires of
Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a
varnish of conventionality--the crust was not so thick in her case--a
nature throbbing with passion. She was everlastingly unappeased,
because incurably romantic. All life, she truly declared, is a search
for a friend.


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