avel Yakovlitch,' replied the young girl with some
annoyance. 'Why will you never talk to me seriously? I shall be angry,'
she added with a little coquettish grimace, and she pouted.

'You will not be angry with me, ideal Zoya Nikitishna; you would not
drive me to the dark depths of hopeless despair. And I can't talk to you
seriously, because I'm not a serious person.'

The young girl shrugged her shoulders, and turned to Bersenyev.

'There, he's always like that; he treats me like a child; and I am
eighteen. I am grown-up now.'

'O Lord!' groaned Shubin, rolling his eyes upwards; and Bersenyev smiled
quietly.

The girl stamped with her little foot.

'Pavel Yakovlitch, I shall be angry! _Helene_ was coming with me,' she
went on, 'but she stopped in the garden. The heat frightened her, but I
am not afraid of the heat. Come along.'

She moved forward along the path, slightly swaying her slender figure at
each step, and with a pretty black-mittened little hand pushing her long
soft curls back from her face.

The friends walked after her (Shubin first pressed his hands, without
speaking, to his heart, and then flung them higher than his head), and
in a few instants they came out in front of one of the numerous country
villas with which Kuntsovo is surrounded. A small wooden house with a
gable, painted a pink colour, stood in the middle of the garden, and
seemed to be peeping out innocently from behind the green trees. Zoya
was the first to open the gate; she ran into the garden, crying: 'I have
brought the wanderers!' A young girl, with a pale and expressive face,
rose from a garden bench near the little path, and in the doorway of
the house appeared a lady in a lilac silk dress, holding an embroidered
cambric handkerchief over her head to screen it from the sun, and
smiling with a weary and listless air.

III

Anna Vassilyevna Stahov--her maiden name was Shubin--had been left,
at seven years old, an orphan and heiress of a pretty considerable
property. She had very rich and also very poor relations; the poor
relations were on her father's, the rich on her mother's side; the
latter including the senator Volgin and the Princes Tchikurasov. Prince
Ardalion Tchikurasov, who had been appointed her guardian, placed her in
the best Moscow boarding-school, and when she left school, took her into
his own home. He kept open house, and gave balls in the winter. Anna
Vassilyevna's future husband, Nikolai Artemyevit