78
ON YEAR AT THE RUSSIAN COURT
and he had rather alarmed me. But love is sometimes blind, isn't it?
We had much diversion over what we called "les écarts de Mademoiselle Stirry."
"I am sure she is a man in disguise," my Aunt de Baranoff always said. "Look how devotedly attached she is to Aline. Don't you think she must be?"
I answered laughing that I knew nothing of that and would not possibly allow such an infamous idea to exist.
Aunt Aline possessed a marvellous gift for languages and spoke I don't know how many; amongst them were Swedish and Finnish, the latter a very difficult language.
