she is going to read it aloud to-day."

"Petit Jean," said Vera Iosifovna to her husband, "dites que l'on
nous donne du the."

Startsev was introduced to Ekaterina Ivanovna, a girl of eighteen,
very much like her mother, thin and pretty. Her expression was still
childish and her figure was soft and slim; and her developed girlish
bosom, healthy and beautiful, was suggestive of spring, real spring.

Then they drank tea with jam, honey, and sweetmeats, and with very
nice cakes, which melted in the mouth. As the evening came on, other
visitors gradually arrived, and Ivan Petrovitch fixed his laughing
eyes on each of them and said:

"How do you do, if you please?"

Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces,
and Vera Iosifovna read her novel. It began like this: "The frost
was intense. . . ." The windows were wide open; from the kitchen
came the clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions. . . . It
was comfortable in the soft deep arm-chair; the lights had such a
friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the
moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and laughter floated
in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was difficult
to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was
lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy
plain. Vera Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess founded
a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and fell in love
with a wandering artist; she read of what never happens in real
life, and yet it was pleasant to listen--it was comfortable, and
such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind, one had
no desire to get up.

"Not badsome . . ." Ivan Petrovitch said softly.

And one of the visitors hearing, with his thoughts far away, said
hardly audibly:

"Yes . . . truly. . . ."

One hour passed, another. In the town gardens close by a band was
playing and a chorus was singing. When Vera Iosifovna shut her
manuscript book, the company was silent for five minutes, listening
to "Lutchina" being sung by the chorus, and the song gave what was
not in the novel and is in real life.

"Do you publish your stories in magazines?" Startsev asked Vera
Iosifovna.

"No," she answered. "I never publish. I write it and put it away
in my cupboard. Why publish?" she explained. "We have enough to
live on."

And for some reason every one sighed.

"And now, Kitten, you play something," I