‘At Moscow, yes, at Moscow,’ she repeated abruptly. ‘Come and see me, we will talk and recall old times. Do you know, Grigory Mihalitch, you have not changed much.’
‘Really? But you have changed, Irina Pavlovna.’
‘I have grown older.’
‘No, I did not mean that.’
‘Irène?’ said a lady in a yellow hat and with yellow hair in an interrogative voice after some preliminary whispering and giggling with the officer sitting near her. ‘Irène?’
‘I am older,’ pursued Irina, without answering the lady, ‘but I am not changed. No, no, I am changed in nothing.’
‘Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche!’ was heard again. The irritable general only remembered the first line of the well-known ditty.
‘It still pricks a little, your excellency,’ observed the stout general with the whiskers, with a loud and broad intonation, apparently quoting from some amusing story, well-known to the whole beau monde, and, with a short wooden laugh he again fell to staring into the air. All the rest of the party laughed too.
‘What a sad dog you are, Boris!’ observed Ratmirov in an undertone. He spoke in English and pronounced even the name ‘Boris’ as if it were English.
‘Irène?’ the lady in the yellow hat said inquiringly for the third time. Irina turned sharply round to her.