"Oh, these everlasting disputes!" said old Korchagin, laughing,
and he pulled the napkin out of his waistcoat, noisily pushed
back his chair, which the footman instantly caught hold of, and
left the table.
Everybody rose after him, and went up to another table on which
stood glasses of scented water. They rinsed their mouths, then
resumed the conversation, interesting to no one.
"Don't you think so?" said Missy to Nekhludoff, calling for a
confirmation of the statement that nothing shows up a man's
character like a game. She noticed that preoccupied and, as it
seemed to her, dissatisfied look which she feared, and she wanted
to find out what had caused it.
"Really, I can't tell; I have never thought about it," Nekhludoff
answered.
"Will you come to mamma?" asked Missy.
"Yes, yes," he said, in a tone which plainly proved that he did
not want to go, and took out a cigarette.
She looked at him in silence, with a questioning look, and he
felt ashamed. "To come into a house and give the people the
dumps," he thought about himself; then, trying to be amiable,
said that he would go with pleasure if the princess would admit
him.
"Oh, yes! Mamma will be pleased. You may smoke there; and Ivan
Ivanovitch is also there."
The mistress of the house, Princess Sophia Vasilievna, was a
recumbent lady. It was the eighth year that, when visitors were
present, she lay in lace and ribbons, surrounded with velvet,
gilding, ivory, bronze, lacquer and flowers, never going out, and
only, as she put it, receiving intimate friends, i.e., those who
according to her idea stood out from the common herd.
Nekhludoff was admitted into the number of these friends because
he was considered clever, because his mother had been an intimate
friend of the family, and because it was desirable that Missy
should marry him.
Sophia Vasilievna's room lay beyond the large and the small
drawing-rooms. In the large drawing-room, Missy, who was in front
of Nekhludoff, stopped resolutely, and taking hold of the back of
a small green chair, faced him.
Missy was very anxious to get married, and as he was a suitable
match and she also liked him, she had accustomed herself to the
thought that he should be hers (not she his). To lose him would
be very mortifying. She now began talking to him in order to get
him to explain his intentions.
"I see something has happened," she said. "Tell me, what is the
matter with you?"
He remembered the meeting in the law court, and frowned and
blushed.
"Yes, something has happened," he said, wishing to be truthful;
"a very unusual and serious event."
"What is it, then? Can you not tell me what it is?" She was
pursuing her aim with that unconscious yet obstinate cunning
often observable in the mentally diseased.