rself up. Shubin looked at her
with a playful smile on his lips. She felt annoyed, but said nothing.

'You heard,' he repeated, 'Mr. Insarov is coming here.'

'I heard,' she replied; 'and I heard how you spoke of him. I am
surprised at you, indeed. Mr. Insarov has not yet set foot in the house,
and you already think fit to turn him into ridicule.'

Shubin was crestfallen at once.

'You are right, you are always right, Elena Nikolaevna,' he muttered;
'but I meant nothing, on my honour. We have been walking together with
him the whole day, and he's a capital fellow, I assure you.'

'I didn't ask your opinion about that,' commented Elena, getting up.

'Is Mr. Insarov a young man?' asked Zoya.

'He is a hundred and forty-four,' replied Shubin with an air of
vexation.

The page announced the arrival of the two friends. They came in.
Bersenyev introduced Insarov. Elena asked them to sit down, and sat
down herself, while Zoya went off upstairs; she had to inform Anna
Vassilyevna of their arrival. A conversation was begun of a rather
insignificant kind, like all first conversations. Shubin was silently
watching from a corner, but there was nothing to watch. In Elena he
detected signs of repressed annoyance against him--Shubin--and that was
all. He looked at Bersenyev and at Insarov, and compared their
faces from a sculptor's point of view. 'They are neither of them
good-looking,' he thought, 'the Bulgarian has a characteristic
face--there now it's in a good light; the Great-Russian is better
adapted for painting; there are no lines, there's expression. But, I
dare say, one might fall in love with either of them. She is not in love
yet, but she will fall in love with Bersenyev,' he decided to himself.
Anna Vassilyevna made her appearance in the drawing-room, and
the conversation took the tone peculiar to summer villas--not the
country-house tone but the peculiar summer visitor tone. It was a
conversation diversified by plenty of subjects; but broken by short
rather wearisome pauses every three minutes. In one of these pauses Anna
Vassilyevna turned to Zoya. Shubin understood her silent hint, and drew
a long face, while Zoya sat down to the piano, and played and sang all
her pieces through. Uvar Ivanovitch showed himself for an instant in the
doorway, but he beat a retreat, convulsively twitching his fingers. Then
tea was served; and then the whole party went out into the garden.... It
began to grow dark outside, and the