ed life
when one might have a splendid one. She remembered her words and
thoughts at dinner, and was proud of them; and when Pimenov suddenly
rose up in her imagination, she felt happy and longed for him to
love her.

When he had finished the story, Lysevitch sat down on the sofa,
exhausted.

"How splendid you are! How handsome!" he began, a little while
afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. "I am happy near
you, dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your
tastes and mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I
have long passed that phase, and want a love as delicate and
immaterial as a ray of sunshine--that is, from the point of view
of a woman of your age, I am of no earthly use."

In his own words, he loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love
and purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but
he loved virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as
something abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured
himself that he loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though
he did not know what those words meant. But he felt comfortable,
snug, warm. Anna Akimovna seemed to him enchanting, original, and
he imagined that the pleasant sensation that was aroused in him by
these surroundings was the very thing that was called platonic love.

He laid his cheek on her hand and said in the tone commonly used
in coaxing little children:

"My precious, why have you punished me?"

"How? When?"

"I have had no Christmas present from you."

Anna Akimovna had never heard before of their sending a Christmas
box to the lawyer, and now she was at a loss how much to give him.
But she must give him something, for he was expecting it, though
he looked at her with eyes full of love.

"I suppose Nazaritch forgot it," she said, "but it is not too late
to set it right."

She suddenly remembered the fifteen hundred she had received the
day before, which was now lying in the toilet drawer in her bedroom.
And when she brought that ungrateful money and gave it to the lawyer,
and he put it in his coat pocket with indolent grace, the whole
incident passed off charmingly and naturally. The sudden reminder
of a Christmas box and this fifteen hundred was not unbecoming in
Lysevitch.

"Merci," he said, and kissed her finger.

Krylin came in with blissful, sleepy face, but without his decorations.

Lysevitch and he stayed a little longer and drank a glass of tea
each, and be