“No, sir,” I answered.

He went in with a sly, oily look in his eyes, smiling mysteriously, rubbing his hands, which were cold from the frost.

“I have the honour to congratulate you,” he said to Orlov, shaking all over with ingratiating, obsequious laughter. “May you increase and multiply like the cedars of Lebanon.”

The visitors went into the bedroom, and were extremely jocose on the subject of a pair of feminine slippers, the rug that had been put down between the two beds, and a grey dressing-jacket that hung at the foot of the bedstead. They were amused that the obstinate man who despised all the common place details of love had been caught in feminine snares in such a simple and ordinary way.

“He who pointed the finger of scorn is bowing the knee in homage,” Kukushkin repeated several times. He had, I may say in parenthesis, an unpleasant habit of adorning his conversation with texts in Church Slavonic. “Sh-sh!” he said as they went from the bedroom into the room next to the study. “Sh-sh! Here Gretchen is dreaming of her Faust.”

He went off into a peal of laughter as though he had said something very amusing. I watched Gruzin, expecting that his musical soul would not endure this laughter, but I was mistaken. His thin, good-natured face beamed with pleasure. When they sat down to play cards, he, lisping and choking with laughter, said that all that “dear George” wanted to complete his domestic felicity was a cherry-wood pipe and a guitar. Pekarsky laughed sedately, but from his serious expression one could see that Orlov’s new love affair was distasteful to him. He did not understand what had happened exactly.

“But how about the husband?” he asked in perplexity, after they had played three rubbers.

“I don’t know,” answered Orlov.

Pekarsky combed his big beard with his fingers and sank into thought, and he did not speak again till supper-time. When they were seated at supper, he began deliberately, drawling every word:

“Altogether, excuse my saying so, I don’t understand either of you. You might love each other and break the seventh commandment to your heart’s content—that I understand. Yes, that’s comprehensible. But why make the husband a party to your secrets? Was there any need for that?”

“But does it make any difference?”

“Hm! …” Pekarsky mused. “Well, then, let me tell you this, my friend,” he went on, evidently thinking hard: “if I ever marry again and you take it into your head to seduce my wife, please do it so than I don’t notice it. It’s much more honest to deceive a man than to break up his family life and injure his reputation. I understand. You both imagine that in living together openly you are doing something exceptionally honourable and advanced, but I can’t agree with that … what shall I call it? … romantic attitude?”

Orlov made no reply. He was out of humour and disinclined to talk. Pekarsky, still perplexed, drummed on the table with his fingers, thought a little, and said:

“I don’t understand you, all the same. You are not a student and she is not a dressmaker. You are both of you people with means. I should have thought you might have arranged a separate flat for her.”

“No, I couldn’t. Read Turgenev.”

“Why should I read him? I have read him already.”

“Turgenev teaches us in his novels that every exalted, noble-minded girl should follow the man she loves to the ends of the earth, and should serve his idea,” said Orlov, screwing up his eyes ironically. “The