I have written to my poor mother,” said the smiling Mademoiselle Bourienne rapidly, in her pleasant mellow tones and with guttural r ’s. She brought into Princess Márya’s strenuous, mournful, and gloomy world a quite different atmosphere, careless, lighthearted, and self-satisfied.
“Princess, I must warn you,” she added, lowering her voice and evidently listening to herself with pleasure, and speaking with exaggerated grasseyement , “the prince has been scolding Michel Ivanoff. He is in a very bad humor, very morose. Be prepared.”
“Ah, dear friend,” replied Princess Márya, “I have asked you never to warn me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge him and would not have others do so.”
The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five minutes late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the sitting room with a look of alarm.
Between twelve and two o’clock, as the day was mapped out, the prince rested and the princess played the clavichord.
XXVI
The gray-haired valet was sitting drowsily listening to the snoring of the prince, who was in his large study. From the far side of the house through the closed doors came the sound of difficult passages—twenty times repeated—of a sonata by Dussek.
Just then a closed carriage and another with a hood drove up to the porch. Prince Andréy got out of the carriage, helped his little wife to alight, and let her pass into the house before him. Old Tíkhon, wearing a wig, put his head out of the door of the antechamber, reported in a whisper that the prince was sleeping, and hastily closed the door. Tíkhon knew