“Yes; but he declined it only because Prince Iván wrote him before the coronation, excusing himself and saying that if he had not taken it, it would have been confiscated, and that he had children and debts, and that now he was unable to return it to him. Peter Labázov replied to him in two lines: ‘Neither I nor my heirs have any right, nor can have any right, to the property legally appropriated by you.’ That was all. How was that? And Prince Iván swallowed it, and in delight locked up that document with the notes in a safe, and showed it to no one.”
One of the peculiarities of the intellectual room was that its visitors knew, whenever they wanted to know, everything that was taking place in the world, no matter how secret the event might have been.
“Still it is a question,” said a new interlocutor, “whether it was just to deprive the children of Prince Iván of the property, with which they have grown up and have been educated, and to which they thought they had a right.”
Thus the conversation was transferred to an abstract sphere, which did not interest Pákhtin.
He felt the necessity of communicating the news to fresh people, and so he rose and, speaking to the right and to the left, walked from one hall to another. One of his fellow officers stopped him to give him the news of Labázov’s arrival.
“Who does not know that?” replied Iván Pávlovich, with a calm smile, turning to the exit. The news had had time to complete its circle, and was again returning to him.
There was nothing else to do in the club, and he went to an evening party. It was not a special entertainment, but a salon where guests were received any evening. There were there eight ladies, and one old colonel, and all found it terribly dull. Pákhtin’s firm gait alone and his smiling