Marya Alekséyevna was snoring! She was fast asleep.
II
Marya Alekséyevna knew what was spoken at the theatre, but she did not yet know what followed that conversation.
At the very time that she was getting more and more angry with her daughter, and, in consequence of having put too much rum in her punch, was snoring in her daughter’s room, Mikhaïl Ivanuitch Storeshnikof was taking supper in a certain fashionable restaurant with the other young gentlemen who had accompanied him to the box.
There was still a fourth person in the company—a French girl who came with the officer. The supper was almost ended.
“Monsieur Storeshnik.”
Storeshnikof felt greatly set up. The French girl addressed him for the third time during the supper.
“Monsieur Storeshnik! Allow me to address you so. It sounds better and is much easier to speak. I did not think that I was going to be the only lady in your company; I hoped to see Adèle here. That would have been charming, I see her so seldom.”
“Adèle unfortunately has quarrelled with me.”
The officer wanted to say something, but he did not speak.
“Don’t believe him, Mademoiselle Julie,” said the civilian. “He does not dare to tell you the truth; he thinks that you will not like it when you find out that he has given up a French girl for a Russian.”
“I don’t know why it was we came here,” said the officer.
“Why, yes, Serge; it was because Jean asked us. And it has been very pleasant for me to get acquainted with Monsieur Storeshnikof. No, Monsieur Storeshnikof; fy, what bad taste you show! I should never have said anything if you had deserted Adèle for that Circassian beauty in whose box you were sitting; but to give up a French girl for a Russian! I imagine her: colorless eyes, colorless, thin hair, a vacant, colorless face. I beg pardon; not colorless, but as you call it, blood with cream [krof so slivkami], and by that you mean a dish which only your Eskimo can take into their mouths.—Jean, let that sinner against grace have the ashtray. Let him scatter ashes on his wicked head!”
“You have spoken so much nonsense, Julie, that it ought to be your head, not his, that should be sown with ashes,” said the officer. “It happens that the very girl whom you called the Circassian was the Russian.”
“You are making sport of me!”
“A genuine Russian,” said the officer.
“Impossible!”
“You are quite wrong, my dear Julie, if you think that our nation has only one type of beauty, like your own. You have a great many blondes, but we, Julie, are a mixture of nations. We have the white-haired like the Finns—”
“Yes, yes, the Finns,” said the French girl.
“And those with black hair, who are even darker than Italians; Tartars and Mongolians—”
“Yes, yes, Tartars and Mongolians; I know about them,” said the French girl again.
“And all of them have given us a share of their blood. We have blondes, whom you may despise, but they are only a local type; a very common type, to be sure, but not predominating.”
“That’s strange. But she is lovely. Why doesn’t she go on the stage? By the way, gentlemen, I only speak of what I have seen. There remains a very important question—her foot. Your great poet Karasen, I have been told, said that in all Russia there could not be found five pair of small, straight little feet.”
“Julie! it was not Karasen who said that, and you had better call him Karamzin. Karamzin was a historian, and he wasn’t a Russian, but a Tartar. Now, here’s a new proof of the variety of our types. It was Pushkin who spoke about the little feet. His poetry was very good in its day, but now it has lost a large part of its value. By the way, the Eskimo live in America, and our savages who drink the blood of elans are called Samoyeds.”
“Thank you, Serge. Karamzin, historian; Pushkin, I know; Eskimo, in America; the Russians are Samoyeds; yes, Samoyeds. That is such a lovely word: Sa-mo-ye-dui! Now I shall remember it. Now, gentlemen, I shall ask Serge to tell me all this again when we are alone. It is a very profitable subject for conversation; besides, science is my hobby. I was born to be a Madame Staël, gentlemen. But this is an episode entirely out of the track. Let us return to the question—her foot.”
“If you will allow me to call upon you tomorrow, Mademoiselle Julie, I shall have the honor of bringing you her shoe.”
“Bring it. I will try it on. That appeals to my curiosity.”
Storeshnikof was enraptured. Why? Because he had got into Jean’s wake, and Jean was in Serge’s wake, and Julie—she was one of the most prominent of the French ladies among all the French ladies of Serge’s society. It was an honor, a great honor.
“I
