Explore "The Vultures" by Henry Seton Merriman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The heart soon accustoms itself to that existence which is called living upon a volcano. Prince Bukaty had indeed known no other life, and to such as had daily intercourse with him he was quite a peaceful and jovial gentleman. He had brought up his children in the same atmosphere of strife and peril, and it is to be presumed that the fit had survived, while the unfit princess, his wife, had turned her face to the wall quite soon, not daring to meet the years in which there could be no hope of alleviation.
The prince's friends were not in Warsaw; many were at the mines. Some lived in Paris; others were exiled to distant parts of Russia. His generation was slowly passing away, and its history is one of the grimmest stories untold. Yet he sat in that bare drawing-room of a poor man and read his Figaro quite placidly, like any bourgeois in the safety of the suburb, only glancing at the clock from time to time.