The Princess Sonia

Ever since that day—indeed, even before it—Martha had been a silent worshiper at the shrine of the princess. She had a passionate love of beauty, and her heart, for all her grave and shy exterior, was packed as full of romance as it could hold. The discovery that this beautiful being was a princess—and a Russian princess, of all others—was meet food for this appetite for the romantic; and she dreamed by the hour about this young woman's life, and wondered what it had been and was to be. She knew she could not be many years older than herself, and she wondered, with burning interest, whether she was or was not married. Sometimes she would hold to one opinion for days, and then something—a mere turn of expression, perhaps—would convert her to the opposite one. She wanted her to be unmarried, so that she might be free to construct from her imagination a beautiful future for her; and yet she dreaded to find out that she was married. There was certainly a look about the princess which contradicted Martha's ideal of her as the possessor of a fair, unwritten life page. Martha had watched her hands to see if she wore a wedding ring; but those extraordinarily beautiful hands were either loaded down with jeweled gauds of antique workmanship or else quite ringless. Still, many married women were careless about wearing their wedding rings, a thing which Martha herself could not comprehend; but she felt that this wonderful creature was removed as far as possible from her in both actuality and ideas.