harms remained. Every one who saw her now for the first
time was impelled to ask himself, if this woman--skinny, sharp-nosed,
and yellow-faced, though still not old in years--could once have been a
beauty, if she was really the same woman who had been the inspiration of
poets.... And every one marvelled inwardly at the mutability of earthly
things. It is true that Pandalevsky discovered that Darya Mihailovna
had preserved her magnificent eyes in a marvellous way; but we have seen
that Pandalevsky also maintained that all Europe knew her.

Darya Mihailovna went every summer to her country place with her
children (she had three: a daughter of seventeen, Natalya, and two sons
of nine and ten years old). She kept open house in the country, that is,
she received men, especially unmarried ones; provincial ladies she could
not endure. But what of the treatment she received from those ladies in
return?

Darya Mihailovna, according to them, was a haughty, immoral, and
insufferable tyrant, and above all--she permitted herself such liberties
in conversation, it was shocking! Darya Mihailovna certainly did not
care to stand on ceremony in the country, and in the unconstrained
frankness of her manners there was perceptible a slight shade of
the contempt of the lioness of the capital for the petty and obscure
creatures who surrounded her. She had a careless, and even a sarcastic
manner with her own set; but the shade of contempt was not there.

By the way, reader, have you observed that a person who is exceptionally
nonchalant with his inferiors, is never nonchalant with persons of a
higher rank? Why is that? But such questions lead to nothing.

When Konstantin Diomiditch, having at last learnt by heart the _etude_
of Thalberg, went down from his bright and cheerful room to the
drawing-room, he already found the whole household assembled. The salon
was already beginning. The lady of the house was reposing on a wide
couch, her feet gathered up under her, and a new French pamphlet in her
hand; at the window behind a tambour frame, sat on one side the daughter
of Darya Mihailovna, on the other, Mlle. Boncourt, the governess, a
dry old maiden lady of sixty, with a false front of black curls under a
parti-coloured cap and cotton wool in her ears; in the corner near the
door was huddled Bassistoff reading a paper, near him were Petya and
Vanya playing draughts, and leaning by the stove, his hands clasped
behind his back, was a gentleman