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 their mother used to be,” said Countess Fuks. “Still, their father, too, was very, very handsome.”

“How could they educate their children there?” asked the hostess.

“They say, nicely. They say that the young man is as nice, as amiable, and as cultured as though he had been brought up in Paris.”