" in the occupations of the ladies
(the reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness
of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature common
to all--namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on the outer side
was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp, straight line from the pure
whiteness of the upper portion of the hand. Still more was the character
of this feminine circle expressed in the manner in which the three
ladies spoke Russian and French--spoke them, that is to say, with
perfect articulation of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives
and prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the ladies
treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up--telling me
their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to which I was so
little accustomed that, for all my glittering buttons and blue facings,
I was in constant fear of being told: "Surely you do not think that we
are talking SERIOUSLY to you? Go away and learn something")--all this, I
say, caused me to feel an entire absence of restraint in this society. I
ventured at times to rise, to move about, and to talk boldly to each
of the ladies except Varenika (whom I always felt it was unbecoming, or
even forbidden, for me to address unless she first spoke to me).

As I listened to her clear, pleasant voice reading aloud, I kept
glancing from her to the path of the flower-garden, where the
rain-spots were making small dark circles in the sand, and thence to
the lime-trees, upon the leaves of which the rain was pattering down in
large detached drops shed from the pale, shimmering edge of the livid
blue cloud which hung suspended over us. Then I would glance at her
again, and then at the last purple rays of the setting sun where they
were throwing the dense clusters of old, rain-washed birches into
brilliant relief. Yet again my eyes would return to Varenika, and, each
time that they did so, it struck me afresh that she was not nearly so
plain as at first I had thought her.

"How I wish that I wasn't in love already!" I reflected, "or that
Sonetchka was Varenika! How nice it would be if suddenly I could become
a member of this family, and have the three ladies for my mother, aunt,
and wife respectively!" All the time that these thoughts kept passing
through my head I kept attentively regarding Varenika as she read, until
somehow I felt as though I were magnetising her, and that presently she
must look