began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real or not? Do you remember what fun it was?”
“Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun in the porch?”
So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of one’s most distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they laughed with quiet enjoyment.
Sónya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they shared the same reminiscences.
Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she recalled did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. She simply enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it.
She only really took part when they recalled Sónya’s first arrival. She told them how afraid she had been of