"What makes you think he's a handsome man?
He has eyes like a sheep's."
"Precisely so.
But in this I yield, of course, to the opinion of our ladies."
"Let's get on, Stepan Trofimovitch, I beg you!
By the way, you're wearing a red neck-tie. Is it long since you've taken to it?"
"I've... I've only put it on to-day."
"And do you take your constitutional?
Do you go for a four-mile walk every day as the doctor told you to?"
"N-not... always."
"I knew you didn't!
I felt sure of that when I was in Switzerland!" she cried irritably.
"Now you must go not four but six miles a day!
You've grown terribly slack, terribly, terribly!
You're not simply getting old, you're getting decrepit.... You shocked me when I first saw you just now, in spite of your red tie, quelle idee rouge!
Go on about Von Lembke if you've really something to tell me, and do finish some time, I entreat you, I'm tired."
"En un mot, I only wanted to say that he is one of those administrators who begin to have power at forty, who, till they're forty, have been stagnating in insignificance and then suddenly come to the front through suddenly acquiring a wife, or some other equally desperate means.... That is, he has gone away now... that is, I mean to say, it was at once whispered in both his ears that I am a corrupter of youth, and a hot-bed of provincial atheism.... He began making inquiries at once."
"Is that true?"
"I took steps about it, in fact.
When he was 'informed' that you 'ruled the province,' vous savez, he allowed himself to use the expression that 'there shall be nothing of that sort in the future.'"
"Did he say that?"
"That 'there shall be nothing of the sort in future,' and, avec cette morgue.... His wife, Yulia Mihailovna, we shall behold at the end of August, she's coming straight from Petersburg."
"From abroad.
We met there."
"Vraiment?"
"In Paris and in Switzerland.
She's related to the Drozdovs."
"Related!
What an extraordinary coincidence!
They say she is ambitious and... supposed to have great connections."
"Nonsense! Connections indeed!
She was an old maid without a farthing till she was five-and-forty. But now she's hooked her Von Lembke, and, of course, her whole object is to push him forward.
They're both intriguers."
"And they say she's two years older than he is?"
"Five.
Her mother used to wear out her skirts on my doorsteps in Moscow; she used to beg for an invitation to our balls as a favour when my husband was living.
And this creature used to sit all night alone in a corner without dancing, with her turquoise fly on her forehead, so that simply from pity I used to have to send her her first partner at two o'clock in the morning.
She was five-and-twenty then, and they used to rig her out in short skirts like a little girl.
It was improper to have them about at last."
"I seem to see that fly."
"I tell you, as soon as I arrived I was in the thick of an intrigue. You read Madame Drozdov's letter, of course. What could be clearer?
What did I find?
That fool Praskovya herself—she always was a fool—looked at me as much as to ask why I'd come.
You can fancy how surprised I was.
I looked round, and there was that Lembke woman at her tricks, and that cousin of hers—old Drozdov's nephew—it was all clear.
You may be sure I changed all that in a twinkling, and Praskovya is on my side again, but what an intrigue!"
"In which you came off victor, however.
Bismarck!"
"Without being a Bismarck I'm equal to falseness and stupidity wherever I meet it, falseness, and Praskovya's folly.
I don't know when I've met such a flabby woman, and what's more her legs are swollen, and she's a good-natured simpleton, too.