kissed again. Mademoiselle Bourienne also began to cry. Prince Andréy evidently felt ill at ease, but to the two women it seemed quite natural that they should cry, and apparently it never entered their heads that it could have been otherwise at this meeting.
“Ah! my dear! … Ah! Marie! …” they suddenly exclaimed, and then laughed. “I dreamed last night …”—“You were not expecting us? …” “Ah! Marie, you have got thinner? …” “And you have grown stouter! …”
“I knew the princess at once,” put in Mademoiselle Bourienne.
“And I had no idea! …” exclaimed Princess Márya. “Ah, André, I did not see you.”
Prince Andréy and his sister, hand in hand, kissed one another, and he told her she was still the same crybaby as ever. Princess Márya had turned toward her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm, gentle look of her large luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested on Prince Andréy’s face.
The little princess talked incessantly, her short, downy upper lip continually and rapidly touching her rosy nether lip when necessary and drawing up again next moment when her face broke into a smile of glittering teeth and sparkling eyes. She told of an accident they had had on the Spásski Hill which might have been serious for her in her condition, and immediately after that informed them that she had left all her clothes in Petersburg and that heaven knew what she would have to dress in here; and that Andréy had quite changed, and that Kitty Odýntsova had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Márya, a real one, but that they would talk of that later. Princess Márya was still looking silently at her brother and her beautiful eyes were full of love and sadness. It was plain that she was following a train of thought independent of her sister-in-law’s words. In the midst of a description of the last Petersburg fête she addressed her brother: