As for the last member of the family, Varenika, she was a well-developed girl of sixteen. The only good features in her were a pair of dark-grey eyes,—which, in their expression of gaiety mingled with quiet attention, greatly resembled those of her aunt—a long coil of flaxen hair, and extremely delicate, beautiful hands.
“I expect, Monsieur Nicolas, you find it wearisome to hear a story begun from the middle?” said Sophia Ivanovna with her good-natured sigh as she turned over some pieces of clothing which she was sewing. The reading aloud had ceased for the moment because Dimitri had left the room on some errand or another.
“Or perhaps you have read Rob Roy before?” she added.
At that period I thought it incumbent upon me, in virtue of my student’s uniform, to reply in a very “clever and original” manner to every question put to me by people whom I did not know very well, and regarded such short, clear answers as “Yes,” “No,” “I like it,” or “I do not care for it,” as things to be ashamed of. Accordingly, looking down at my new and fashionably-cut trousers and the glittering buttons of my tunic, I replied that I had never read Rob Roy, but that it interested me greatly to hear it, since I preferred to read books from the middle rather than from the beginning.
“It is twice as interesting,” I added with a self-satisfied smirk; “for then one can guess what has gone before as well as what is to come after.”
The Princess smiled what I thought was a forced smile, but one which I discovered later to be her only one.
“Well, perhaps that is true,” she said. “But tell me, Nicolas (you will not be offended if I drop the Monsieur)—tell me, are you going to be in town long? When do you go away?”
“I do not know quite. Perhaps to-morrow, or perhaps not for some while yet,” I replied for some reason or another, though I knew perfectly well that in reality we were to go to-morrow.
“I wish you could stop longer, both for your own sake and for Dimitri’s,” she said in a meditative manner. “At your age friendship is a weak thing.”
I felt that every one was looking at me, and waiting to see what I should say—though certainly Varenika made a pretence of looking at her aunt’s work. I felt, in fact, as though I were being put through an examination, and that it behoved me to figure in it as well as possible.