“Very good!  Perhaps this information will come in handy!” he said to himself, thinking over his future measures and plans.  “Let us see—­let us feel our way—­perhaps it is really so!  But I must go carefully and keep on my guard, and the whole thing is in my hands, dear baroness!  We will spin a thread from you before all is over.”

XII

THE BARONESS AT HOME

Every Wednesday Baroness von Doering received her intimate friends.  She did not care for rivals, and therefore ladies were not invited to these evenings.  The intimate circle of the baroness consisted of our Knights of Industry and the “pigeons” of the bureaucracy, the world of finance, the aristocracy, which were the objects of the knights’ desires.

It often happened, however, that the number of guests at these intimate evenings went as high as fifty, and sometimes even more.

The baroness was passionately fond of games of chance, and always sat down to the card table with enthusiasm.  But as this was done conspicuously, in sight of all her guests, the latter could not fail to note that fortune obstinately turned away from the baroness.  She almost never won on the green cloth; sometimes Kovroff won, sometimes Kallash, sometimes Karozitch, but with the slight difference that the last won more seldom and less than the other two.

Thus every Wednesday a considerable sum found its way from the pocketbook of the baroness into that of one of her colleagues, to find its way back again the next morning.  The purpose of this clever scheme was that the “pigeons” who visited the luxurious salons of the baroness, and whose money paid the expenses of these salons, should not have the smallest grounds for suspicion that the dear baroness’s apartment was nothing but a den of sharpers.  Her guests all considered her charming, to begin with, and also rich and independent and passionate by nature.  This explained her love of play and the excitement it brought, and which she would not give up, in spite of her repeated heavy losses.

Her colleagues, the Knights of Industry, acted on a carefully devised and rigidly followed plan.  They were far from putting their uncanny skill in motion every Wednesday.  So long as they had no big game in sight, the game remained clean and honest.  In this way the band might lose two or three thousand rubles, but such a loss had no great importance, and was soon made up when some fat “pigeon” appeared.

It sometimes happened that this wily scheme of honest play went on for five or six weeks in succession, so that the small fry, winning the band’s money, remained entirely convinced that it was playing in an honorable and respectable private house, and very naturally spread abroad the fame of it throughout the whole city.  But when the fat pigeon at last appeared, the band put forth all its forces, all the wiles of the black art, and in a few hours made up for the generous losses of a month of honorable and irreproachable play on the green cloth.