"That you would have the misfortune to be obliged to endure me at dinner to-day," Bärenburg completes her sentence. "Mademoiselle Jeliagin wrote me asking, if I were not engaged, to dine en famille at her mother's. I was already engaged"--with a side glance at Mascha--"but I excused myself. Have I perhaps made a mistake in the date?"
"Oh, no!" replies Mascha. "Now I remember, Anna told me some gentleman would come to dinner, and I was vexed that my last dinner with papa would be spoiled."
"Mascha!" says Nikolai, shocked.
And Lensky says, half vexed, half laughingly: "My daughter looks like a grown girl; really, she is, I believe, twelve years old at the most."
"Papa!" says Mascha, blushing hotly. "I did not know that it was to be Count Bärenburg when I was vexed."
"So, and that alters the case," laughs Bärenburg.
"It seems so," replies Nikolai.
But Mascha, observing that they are making merry over her naïveté, suddenly becomes very dignified and says: "It stands to reason that a man who has saved my brother's life should not be a mere casual acquaintance to me." Then, becoming defiant from embarrassment, she slips her little hand in Nikolai's arm and adds: "I love my brother dearly."
Then the Jeliagins enter the room, the temperature falls a couple of degrees, the atmosphere becomes icy.
They look strangely: Barbara in her faded lilac dress and imitation diamonds. As for Anna, she is, in her cold, blond manner, without doubt very handsome, and her black tulle gown becomes her somewhat too tall and slender figure wonderfully. But although she is but twenty-six, her appearance has already that not to be described sharpness, pointedness, dryness, the sign of girls whose bloom begins to wither before it has yet found opportunity to fully unfold.