half an
Englishman, and a tact which he certainly owed to his foreign blood; he
was irreproachable in appearance, in the simplicity of his dress, in the
smoothness of his fair hair and well-trimmed mustache; he appeared
thoroughly at home among his new-found relations, and anxious to please
them all alike; he was modest and unassuming, for he did not speak of
himself, and he gave no opinion saving such as should be pleasing to
his audience. He had all this, and yet in the cold stare of his stony
eyes, in the ungainly twist of his broad white hand, where the bones
and sinews crossed and recrossed like a network of marble, in the
decisive tone with which he uttered the most flattering remarks,
there was something which betrayed a tyrannical and unyielding
character,--something which struck me at first sight, and which
suggested a nature by no means so gentle and amiable as he was willing
it should appear.

Nevertheless, I was the only one to notice these signs, to judge by the
enthusiasm which Patoff produced at Carvel Place in those first hours of
his stay. It is true that the professor was not present, although he had
left me on the pretense of going to see Paul, and Macaulay Carvel was
resting from his journey in his own rooms, in a remote part of the
house; but I judged that the latter had already fallen under the spell
of Patoff's manner, and that it would not be easy to find out what the
man of science really thought about the Anglo-Russian. They probably
knew each other of old, and whatever opinions they held of each other
were fully formed.

Paul sat in his easy-chair in the midst of the family, and smiled and
surveyed everything through his single eyeglass, and if anything did not
please him he did not say so. John had something to do, and went away,
then Mrs. Carvel wanted to see her son alone, and she left us too; so
that Chrysophrasia and Hermione and I remained to amuse Patoff. Hermione
immediately began to do so after her own fashion. I think that of all of
us she was the one least inclined to give him absolute supremacy at
first, but he interested her, for she had seen little of the world, and
nothing of such men as her cousin Paul, who was thirty years of age, and
had been to most of the courts of the world in the course of twelve
years in the diplomatic service. She was not inclined to admit that
knowledge of the world was superiority of itself, nor that an easy
manner and an irreproachable appearance c