“Isn’t my lucky star working for me again?” flashed through Sanin’s mind.
“Polozov! Ippolit Sidorovitch! Is it you?”
The figure stopped, raised his diminutive eyes, waited a little, and ungluing his lips at last, brought out in a rather hoarse falsetto, “Dimitri Sanin?”
“That’s me!” cried Sanin, and he shook one of Polozov’s hands; arrayed in tight kid-gloves of an ashen-grey colour, they hung as lifeless as before beside his barrel-shaped legs. “Have you been here long? Where have you come from? Where are you stopping?”
“I came yesterday from Wiesbaden,” Polozov replied in deliberate tones, “to do some shopping for my wife, and I’m going back to Wiesbaden to-day.”
“Oh, yes! You’re married, to be sure, and they say, to such a beauty!”
Polozov turned his eyes away. “Yes, they say so.”
Sanin laughed. “I see you’re just the same … as phlegmatic as you were at school.”
“Why should I be different?”
“And they do say,” Sanin added with special emphasis on the word “do,” “that your wife is very rich.”