And you, Dmitri Pavlovitch,' added Polozov, 'take a room for yourself and come in in three-quarters of an hour. We will dine together.'

Polozov waddled off, while Sanin asked for an inexpensive room for himself; and after setting his attire to rights, and resting a little, he repaired to the immense apartment occupied by his Serenity (Durchlaucht) Prince von Polozov.

He found this 'prince' enthroned in a luxurious velvet arm-chair in the middle of a most magnificent drawing-room. Sanin's phlegmatic friend had already had time to have a bath and to array himself in a most sumptuous satin dressing-gown; he had put a crimson fez on his head. Sanin approached him and scrutinised him for some time. Polozov was sitting rigid as an idol; he did not even turn his face in his direction, did not even move an eyebrow, did not utter a sound. It was truly a sublime spectacle! After having admired him for a couple of minutes, Sanin was on the point of speaking, of breaking this hallowed silence, when suddenly the door from the next room was thrown open, and in the doorway appeared a young and beautiful lady in a white silk dress trimmed with black lace, and with diamonds on her arms and neck--Maria Nikolaevna Polozov. Her thick fair hair fell on both sides of her head, braided, but not fastened up into a knot.

XXXIV

'Ah, I beg your pardon!' she said with a smile half-embarrassed, half-ironical, instantly taking hold of one end of a plait of her hair and fastening on Sanin her large, grey, clear eyes.

'I did not think you had come yet.'

'Sanin, Dmitri Pavlovitch--known him from a boy,' observed Polozov, as before not turning towards him and not getting up, but pointing at him with one finger.

'Yes.... I know.... You told me before. Very glad to make your acquaintance. But I wanted to ask you, Ippolit Sidorovitch.... My maid seems to have lost her senses to-day ...'

'To do your hair up?'

'Yes, yes, please. I beg your pardon,' Maria Nikolaevna repeated with the same smile. She nodded to Sanin, and turning swiftly, vanished through the doorway, leaving behind her a fleeting but graceful impression of a charming neck, exquisite shoulders, an exquisite figure.

Polozov got up, and rolling ponderously, went out by the same door.

Sanin did not doubt for a single second that his presence in 'Prince Polozov's' drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its mistress; the whole point of her entry had been the display of her hair, which was certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted indeed at this freak on the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she is anxious to impress me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be accommodating about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of Gemma that all other women had absolutely no significance for him; he hardly noticed them; and this time he went no further than thinking, 'Yes, it was the truth they told me; that lady's really magnificent to look at!'

But had he not been in such an exceptional state of mind he would most likely have expressed himself differently; Maria Nikolaevna Polozov, by birth Kolishkin, was a very striking personality. And not that she was of a beauty to which no exception could be taken; traces of her plebeian origin were rather clearly apparent in her. Her forehead was low, her nose rather fleshy and turned up; she could boast neither of the delicacy of her skin nor of the elegance of her hands and feet--but what did all that matter? Any one meeting her would not, to use Pushkin's words, have stood still before 'the holy shrine of beauty,' but before the sorcery of a half-Russian, half-Gipsy woman's body in its full flower and full power ... and he would have been nothing loath to stand still!

But Gemma's image preserved Sanin like the three-fold armour of which the poets sing.

Ten minutes later Maria Nikolaevna appeared again, escorted by her husband. She went up to Sanin ... and her walk was such that some eccentrics of that--alas!--already, distant day, were simply crazy over her walk alone. 'That woman, when she comes towards one, seems as though she is bringing all the happiness of one's life to meet one,' one of them used to say. She went up to Sanin, and holding out her hand to him, said in her caressing and, as it were, subdued voice in Russian, 'You will wait for me, won't you? I'll be back soon.'

Sanin bowed respectfully, while Maria Nikolaevna vanished behind the curtain over the outside door; and as she vanished turned her head back over her shoulder, and smiled again, and again left behind her the same impression of grace.

When she smiled, not one and not two, but three dimples came out on each cheek, and her eyes smiled more than her lips--long, crimson, juicy lips with two tiny moles on the left side of them.

Polozov waddled into the room and again established himself in the arm-chair. He was speechless as before; but from time to time a queer smile puffed out his colourless and already wrinkled cheeks. He looked like an old man, though he was only three years older than Sanin.

The dinner with which he regaled his guest would of course have satisfied the most exacting gourmand, but to Sanin it seemed endless, insupportable! Polozov ate slowly, 'with feeling, with judgment, with deliberation,' bending attentively over his plate, and sniffing at almost every morsel. First he rinsed his mouth with wine, then swallowed it and smacked his lips.... Over the roast meat he suddenly began to talk--but of what? Of merino sheep, of which he was intending to order a whole flock, and in such detail, with such tenderness, using all the while endearing pet names for them. After drinking a cup of coffee, hot to boiling point (he had several times in a voice of tearful irritation mentioned to the waiter that he had been served the evening before with coffee, cold--cold as ice!) and bitten off the end of a Havannah cigar with his crooked yellow teeth, he dropped off, as his habit was, into a nap, to the intense delight of Sanin, who began walking up and down with noiseless steps on the soft carpet, and dreaming of his life with Gemma and of what news he would bring back to her. Polozov, however, awoke, as he remarked himself, earlier than usual--he had slept only an hour and a half--and after drinking a glass of iced seltzer water, and swallowing eight spoonfuls of jam, Russian jam, which his valet brought him in a dark-green genuine 'Kiev' jar, and without which, in his own words, he could not live, he stared with his swollen eyes at Sanin and asked him wouldn't he like to play a game of 'fools' with him. Sanin agreed readily; he was afraid that Polozov would begin talking again about lambs and ewes and fat tails.