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might still harbor.
    Once a decision was made, Nikki faced all prospects undaunted. He looked on the world as available for his pleasure alone, and therefore his inclinations, however extraordinary, must be satisfied.
    Nikki stood gazing across the small river with a cold, calculating look. Half musing, half aloud, he quietly murmured, “Now, this calls for a nice judgment, this art of seduction. You must be plain but not too plain, be adept at murmuring fulsomely expressed endearments with a delicate sincerity, and you must smile politely as you pretend to take what is, in fact, willingly given. It goes without saying that one cannot be overhampered by scruples.”
    “That may all be very fine in the society in which youmove, Nikki,” Cernov retorted, “where everyone knows the rules of amorous jousting and seldom departs from the proscribed formula, but in the case of Forseus’s wife, I think you’ll be dealing with a female unfamiliar with those ‘niceties.’ ”
    “I am credibly informed,” Illyich stated with cheerful maliciousness, “that she’s untainted by scandal.”
    “So
far
, she’s been untainted by scandal,” Nikki remarked humorlessly, and with a careless gesture of farewell walked toward the river.
    Thus these elegant, bored, restless young blades became involved in this peccadillo to breathe some freshness and vitality into their boredom. The nascent industrial energy of the age had doubled their already princely revenues without efforts of their own. They were, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, “dulled by luxury, enervated by ease, staled by amusement.”
    As for the object of this chase, the pursued, the diversion to the restless young birds of paradise, Alisa, the young wife of the old merchant Forseus, was an innocent. She wasn’t an innocent to deliberate cruelty or coldness of a man (no one who had lived with Valdemar Forseus for six years was unacquainted with evil), but unschooled and innocent in receiving kindly overtures from a man playing the game of seduction. An education from books, however exceptional, lacks the necessary information that real-life experience teaches. In the gilded circles of Petersburg society, amatory dalliance and flirtation had attained the status and perfection of a fine art, and over the years Nikki had refined and polished his practical and aesthetic skill to a virtuoso proficiency.
    So here we have the age-old confrontation.
    The unsophisticated and untutored young girl encountering the master technician with an artist’s touch.
    Nikki’s career in dalliance had, in fact, begun in earnest when he was barely seventeen, and that first episode had disastrously left its mark.
    One afternoon, sixteen long years ago, while squiring
Maman
to one of her numerous visits in the manner of a dutiful son, he’d caught the practiced eye of one of his mother’s friends; in fact, had almost heard the audible click in Countess Plentikov’s beautiful head when she had, for the first time, seriously noticed that the moody, sulky, darkly romantic boy had turned into a man.
    Even at seventeen and not grown to his full height, Nikki was formidable, inches over six feet, lean, with raw-boned, powerful shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and slim hips. The sulky coltishness, restless under the conflicting urges of his adolescence, had suddenly intrigued the Countess. With the eye of a confirmed connoisseur of male flesh, Soronina’s glance had appraised the splendid young body as if he were standing at stud.
    Countess Soronina had known Nikki from the cradle, and at thirty-six she had two marriageable daughters of her own. She was, however, still an exquisitely beautiful woman, slim, petite, golden-haired; her figure was carefully maintained, the soft, pale complexion still perfect, although its beauty took increasing time to care for.
    Like most patricians of their class, the Count and Countess Plentikov had many years before acquired the habit of being