Half an hour later Bazarov and Arkady made their way together into the drawing room.
It was a large lofty room, luxuriously furnished but with little personal taste.
Heavy expensive furniture stood in a conventional stiff arrangement along the walls, which were covered in a buff wall paper decorated with golden arabesques. Odintsov had ordered the furniture from Moscow through a wine merchant who was a friend and agent of his.
Over a sofa in the center of one wall hung a portrait of a flabby fair-haired man, which seemed to look disapprovingly at the visitors.
“It must be the late husband,” whispered Bazarov to Arkady. “Shall we dash off?”
But at that moment the hostess entered.
She wore a light muslin dress; her hair, smoothly brushed back behind her ears, imparted a girlish expression to her pure, fresh face.
“Thank you for keeping your promise,” she began. “You must stay a little while; you won’t find it so bad here.
I will introduce you to my sister; she plays the piano well.
That’s a matter of indifference to you, Monsieur Bazarov, but you, Monsieur Kirsanov, are fond of music, I believe. Apart from my sister, an old aunt lives with me, and a neighbor sometimes comes over to play cards. That makes up our whole circle.
And now let us sit down.”
Madame Odintsov delivered this whole little speech very fluently and distinctly, as if she had learned it by heart; then she turned to Arkady.
It appeared that her mother had known Arkady’s mother and had even been her confidante in her love for Nikolai Petrovich.
Arkady began to talk with warm feeling about his dead mother; meanwhile Bazarov sat and looked through some albums.
“What a tame cat I’ve become,” he thought.
A beautiful white wolfhound with a blue collar ran into the drawing room and tapped on the floor with its paws; it was followed by a girl of eighteen with a round and pleasing face and small dark eyes.
In her hands she held a basket filled with flowers.
“This is my Katya,” said Madame Odintsov, nodding in her direction.
Katya made a slight curtsey, sat down beside her sister and began arranging the flowers.
The wolfhound, whose name was Fifi, went up to both visitors in turn, wagging its tail and thrusting its cold nose into their hands.
“Did you pick them all yourself?” asked Madame Odintsov.
“Yes,” answered Katya.
“Is auntie coming down for tea?”
“She’s coming.”
When Katya spoke, her face had a charming smile, at once bashful and candid, and she looked up from under her eyebrows with a kind of amusing severity.
Everything about her was naive and undeveloped, her voice, the downy bloom on her face, the rosy hands with white palms and the rather narrow shoulders . . . she was constantly blushing and she breathed quickly.
Madame Odintsov turned to Bazarov.
“You are looking at pictures out of politeness, Evgeny Vassilich,” she began.
“It doesn’t interest you, so you had better come and join us, and we will have a discussion about something.”
Bazarov moved nearer.
“What have you decided to discuss?” he muttered.
“Whatever you like.
I warn you, I am dreadfully argumentative.”
“You?”
“Yes.
That seems to surprise you.
Why?”
“Because, so far as I can judge, you have a calm and cool temperament and to be argumentative one needs to get excited.”
“How have you managed to sum me up so quickly?
In the first place I am impatient and persistent — you should ask Katya; and secondly I am very easily carried away.”
Bazarov looked at Anna Sergeyevna.
“Perhaps. You know best.
Very well, if you want a discussion — so be it.
I was looking at the views of Swiss mountains in your albums, and you remarked that they couldn’t interest me.
You said that because you suppose I have no artistic feeling — and it is true I have none; but those views might interest me from a geological standpoint, for studying the formation of mountains, for instance.”
“Excuse me; but as a geologist, you would rather study a book, some special work on the subject and not a drawing.”
“The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.”
Anna Sergeyevna was silent for a few moments.
“So you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table and by so doing bringing her face nearer to Bazarov. “How do you manage without it?”
“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”