Gloria Victis! by Ossip Schubin

But what had induced the exquisitely-beautiful girl to choose such a husband as this, every one asked; and no one answered. The question had to be dismissed with a shrug, and, 'She is a riddle!'

The same thing had been said four years previously, when with an air of proud indifference, and with cold, 'level-fronting eyelids,' she had appeared in Vienna society. There was about her an exotic air always irresistible to the genuine Austrian temperament. Her father was a diplomatist, her mother a Russian. Wjera's Russian blood betrayed itself in everything about her, in her deep, almost harsh voice, which was, nevertheless, capable of exquisite modulations, in the hybrid combination of Oriental nonchalance and northern energy that characterized her whole bearing, her gestures, her figure.