'How did you know that?' muttered Sanin, dumfoundered.
'The earth is full of rumours, Dimitri Pavlovitch; but anyway, I know you were quite right, perfectly right, and behaved like a knight. Tell me, was that lady your betrothed?'
Sanin slightly frowned ...
'There, I won't, I won't,' Maria Nikolaevna hastened to say. 'You don't like it, forgive me, I won't do it, don't be angry!' Polozov came in from the next room with a newspaper in his hand. 'What do you want? Or is dinner ready?'
'Dinner'll be ready directly, but just see what I've read in the Northern Bee ... Prince Gromoboy is dead.'
Maria Nikolaevna raised her head.
'Ah! I wish him the joys of Paradise! He used,' she turned to Sanin, 'to fill all my rooms with camellias every February on my birthday, But it wasn't worth spending the winter in Petersburg for that. He must have been over seventy, I should say?' she said to her husband.
'Yes, he was. They describe his funeral in the paper. All the court were present. And here's a poem too, of Prince Kovrizhkin's on the occasion.'
'That's nice!'
'Shall I read them? The prince calls him the good man of wise counsel.'
'No, don't. The good man of wise counsel? He was simply the goodman of Tatiana Yurevna. Come to dinner. Life is for the living. Dimitri Pavlovitch, your arm.'
* * * * *
The dinner was, as on the day before, superb, and the meal was a very lively one. Maria Nikolaevna knew how to tell a story ... a rare gift in a woman, and especially in a Russian one! She did not restrict herself in her expressions; her countrywomen received particularly severe treatment at her hands. Sanin was more than once set laughing by some bold and well-directed word. Above all, Maria Nikolaevna had no patience with hypocrisy, cant, and humbug. She discovered it almost everywhere. She, as it were, plumed herself on and boasted of the humble surroundings in which she had begun life. She told rather queer anecdotes of her relations in the days of her childhood, spoke of herself as quite as much of a clodhopper as Natalya Kirilovna Narishkin. It became apparent to Sanin that she had been through a great deal more in her time than the majority of women of her age.
Polozov ate meditatively, drank attentively, and only occasionally cast first on his wife, then on Sanin, his lightish, dim-looking, but, in reality, very keen eyes.
'What a clever darling you are!' cried Maria Nikolaevna, turning to him; 'how well you carried out all my commissions in Frankfort! I could give you a kiss on your forehead for it, but you're not very keen after kisses.'