onversation with his fair
pursuers--or rather, so deeply did those fair pursuers enmesh him in the
toils of small talk (which they accomplished through the expedient of
asking him endless subtle riddles which brought the sweat to his brow in
his attempts to guess them)--that he forgot the claims of courtesy which
required him first of all to greet his hostess. In fact, he remembered
those claims only on hearing the Governor's wife herself addressing him.
She had been standing before him for several minutes, and now greeted
him with suave expressement and the words, "So HERE you are, Paul
Ivanovitch!" But what she said next I am not in a position to report,
for she spoke in the ultra-refined tone and vein wherein ladies and
gentlemen customarily express themselves in high-class novels which have
been written by experts more qualified than I am to describe salons, and
able to boast of some acquaintance with good society. In effect, what
the Governor's wife said was that she hoped--she greatly hoped--that
Monsieur Chichikov's heart still contained a corner--even the smallest
possible corner--for those whom he had so cruelly forgotten. Upon that
Chichikov turned to her, and was on the point of returning a reply at
least no worse than that which would have been returned, under similar
circumstances, by the hero of a fashionable novelette, when he stopped
short, as though thunderstruck.

Before him there was standing not only Madame, but also a young girl
whom she was holding by the hand. The golden hair, the fine-drawn,
delicate contours, the face with its bewitching oval--a face which might
have served as a model for the countenance of the Madonna, since it was
of a type rarely to be met with in Russia, where nearly everything, from
plains to human feet, is, rather, on the gigantic scale; these features,
I say, were those of the identical maiden whom Chichikov had encountered
on the road when he had been fleeing from Nozdrev's. His emotion was
such that he could not formulate a single intelligible syllable; he
could merely murmur the devil only knows what, though certainly
nothing of the kind which would have risen to the lips of the hero of a
fashionable novel.

"I think that you have not met my daughter before?" said Madame. "She is
just fresh from school."

He replied that he HAD had the happiness of meeting Mademoiselle before,
and under rather unexpected circumstances; but on his trying to say
something further his