mpany.

I was struck by the first sight of him just as I had been four years
before, when I saw him for the first time. I had not forgotten him in
the least. But I think there are some countenances which always seem to
exhibit something new which one has not noticed before, every time
one meets them, though one may have seen them a hundred times already.
Apparently he was exactly the same as he had been four years before. He
was as elegant, as dignified, he moved with the same air of consequence
as before, indeed he looked almost as young. His faint smile had just
the same official graciousness and complacency. His eyes had the same
stern, thoughtful and, as it were, preoccupied look. In fact, it seemed
as though we had only parted the day before. But one thing struck me. In
old days, though he had been considered handsome, his face was "like a
mask," as some of our sharp-tongued ladies had expressed it. Now--now,
I don't know why he impressed me at once as absolutely, incontestably
beautiful, so that no one could have said that his face was like a mask.
Wasn't it perhaps that he was a little paler and seemed rather thinner
than before? Or was there, perhaps, the light of some new idea in his
eyes?

"Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch!" cried Varvara Petrovna, drawing herself up
but not rising from her chair. "Stop a minute!" She checked his advance
with a peremptory gesture.

But to explain the awful question which immediately followed that
gesture and exclamation--a question which I should have imagined to be
impossible even in Varvara Petrovna, I must ask the reader to remember
what that lady's temperament had always been, and the extraordinary
impulsiveness she showed at some critical moments. I beg him to consider
also, that in spite of the exceptional strength of her spirit and
the very considerable amount of common sense and practical, so to say
business, tact she possessed, there were moments in her life in which
she abandoned herself altogether, entirely and, if it's permissible
to say so, absolutely without restraint. I beg him to take into
consideration also that the present moment might really be for her one
of those in which all the essence of life, of all the past and all the
present, perhaps, too, all the future, is concentrated, as it were,
focused. I must briefly recall, too, the anonymous letter of which she
had spoken to Praskovya Ivanovna with so much irritation, though I think
she said nothing of the latter