“Raising a sleeve to his face, the Count could detect smoke from a fireplace and the hint of an oriental eau de cologne. Setting out from some elegant house on the Boulevard Ring, this young beauty presumably arrived in an automobile as black as her coat. Or perhaps she had opted to walk down Tverskaya Street, where Pushkin’s statue stood pensive but undaunted in the freshly fallen snow. Or better yet, she had come by sleigh with the hooves of the horses sounding on the cobbled streets”