‘No, good heavens! ... what an absurd idea! But I have a girl with me.’...
‘Oh!’ articulated Litvinov, with a face of studied politeness, as though he would ask pardon, and he dropped his eyes.
‘She is only six years old,’ pursued Potugin. ‘She’s an orphan ... the daughter of a lady ... a good friend of mine. So we had better meet here. Good-bye.’
He pulled his hat over his curly head, and disappeared quickly. Twice there was a glimpse of him under the gas-lamps in the rather meanly lighted road that leads into the Lichtenthaler Allee.
[VI]
‘A strange man!’ thought Litvinov, as he turned into the hotel where he was staying; ‘a strange man! I must see more of him!’ He went into his room; a letter on the table caught his eye. ‘Ah! from Tanya!’ he thought, and was overjoyed at once; but the letter was from his country place, from his father. Litvinov broke the thick heraldic seal, and was just setting to work to read it ... when he was struck by a strong, very agreeable, and familiar fragrance, and saw in the window a great bunch of fresh heliotrope in a glass of water. Litvinov bent over them not without amazement, touched them, and smelt them.... Something seemed to stir in his memory, something very remote ... but what, precisely, he could not discover. He rang for the servant and asked him where these flowers had come from. The man replied that they had been brought by a lady who would not give her name, but said that ‘Herr Zlitenhov’ would be sure to guess who she was by the flowers. Again something stirred in Litvinov’s memory. He asked the man what the lady looked like, and the servant informed him that she was tall and grandly dressed and had a veil over her face. ‘A Russian countess most likely,’ he added.
‘What makes you think that?’ asked Litvinov.
‘She gave me two guldens,’ responded the servant with a grin.