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‘Here’s my squadron!’ cried Mr. Ratsch, laying his heavy hand on the children’s heads one after another. ‘Kolia, Olga, Sashka and Mashka! This one’s eight, this one’s seven, that one’s four, and this one’s only two! Ha! ha! ha! As you can see, my wife and I haven’t wasted our time! Eh, Eleonora Karpovna?’

‘You always say things like that,’ observed Eleonora Karpovna and she turned away.

‘And she’s bestowed such Russian names on her squallers!’ Mr. Ratsch pursued. ‘The next thing, she’ll have them all baptized into the Orthodox Church! Yes, by Jove! She’s so Slavonic in her sympathies, ‘pon my soul, she is, though she is of German blood! Eleonora Karpovna, are you Slavonic?’

Eleonora Karpovna lost her temper.

‘I’m a petty councillor’s wife, that’s what I am! And so I’m a Russian lady and all you may say….’

‘There, the way she loves Russia, it’s simply awful!’ broke in Ivan Demianitch. ‘A perfect volcano, ho, ho!’

‘Well, and what of it?’ pursued Eleonora Karpovna. ‘To be sure I love Russia, for where else could I obtain noble rank? And my children too are nobly born, you know. Kolia, sitze ruhig mit den Fussen!’

Ratsch waved his hand to her.

‘There, there, princess, don’t excite yourself! But where’s the nobly born Viktor? To be sure, he’s always gadding about! He’ll come across the inspector one of these fine days! He’ll give him a talking-to! Das ist ein Bummler, Fiktor!’

‘Dem Fiktov kann ich nicht kommandiren, Ivan Demianitch. Sie wissen wohl!’ grumbled Eleonora Karpovna.

I looked at Fustov, as though wishing finally to arrive at what induced him to visit such people… but at that instant there came into the room a tall girl in a black dress, the elder daughter of Mr. Ratsch, to whom Fustov had referred…. I perceived the explanation of my friend’s frequent visits.

VII

There is somewhere, I remember, in Shakespeare, something about ‘a white dove in a flock of black crows’; that was just the impression made on me by the girl, who entered the room. Between the world surrounding her and herself there seemed to be too little in common; she herself seemed secretly bewildered and wondering how she had come there. All the members of Mr. Ratsch’s family looked self-satisfied, simple-hearted, healthy creatures; her beautiful, but already careworn, face bore the traces of depression, pride and morbidity. The others, unmistakable plebeians, were unconstrained in their manners, coarse perhaps, but simple; but a painful uneasiness was manifest in all her indubitably aristocratic nature. In her very exterior there was no trace of the type characteristic of the German race; she recalled rather the children of the south. The excessively thick, lustreless black hair, the hollow, black, lifeless but beautiful eyes, the low, prominent brow, the aquiline nose, the livid pallor of the smooth skin, a certain tragic line near the delicate lips, and in the slightly sunken cheeks, something abrupt, and at the same time helpless in the movements, elegance without gracefulness… in Italy all this would not have struck me as exceptional, but in Moscow, near the Pretchistensky boulevard, it simply astonished me! I got up from my seat on her entrance; she flung me a swift, uneasy glance, and dropping her black eyelashes, sat down near the window ‘like Tatiana.’ (Pushkin’s Oniegin was then fresh in every one’s mind.) I glanced at Fustov, but my friend was standing with his back to me, taking a cup of tea from the plump hands of Eleonora Karpovna. I noticed further that the girl as she came in seemed to bring with her a breath of slight physical chillness…. ‘What a statue!’ was my thought.

VIII

‘Piotr Gavrilitch,’ thundered Mr. Ratsch, turning to me, ‘let me introduce you to my… to my… my number one, ha, ha, ha! to Susanna Ivanovna!’

I bowed in silence, and thought at once: ‘Why, the name too is not the same sort as the others,’ while Susanna rose slightly, without smiling or loosening her tightly clasped hands.