“Both he and she were remarkable people,” said another lady. “I have been told—I don’t know whether it is true—that wherever they worked in the mines in Siberia, or whatever it is called, the convicts, who were with them, improved in their presence.”
“But she has never worked in the mines,” Pákhtin corrected her.
How much that year ’56 meant! Three years before no one had been thinking of the Labázovs, and if anyone recalled them, it was with that unaccountable feeling of dread with which one speaks of one lately dead; but now they vividly recalled all the former relations, all the beautiful qualities, and each lady was making a plan for getting the monopoly of the Labázovs, in order to treat the other guests to them.
“Their son and their daughter have come with them,” said Pákhtin.
“If they are only as handsome as