The Torrents Of Spring

XXXIV
‘Ah, I beg your pardon!’ she said with a smile half-embarrassed, halfironical,
instantly taking hold of one end of a plait of her hair and fastening
on Sanin her large, grey, clear eyes.
‘I did not think you had come yet.’
‘Sanin, Dmitri Pavlovitch – known him from a boy,’ observed Polozov,
as before not turning towards him and not getting up, but pointing at
him with one finger.
‘Yes… . I know… . You told me before. Very glad to make your acquaintance.
But I wanted to ask you, Ippolit Sidorovitch… . My maid
seems to have lost her senses to-day … ’
‘To do your hair up?’
‘Yes, yes, please. I beg your pardon,’ Maria Nikolaevna repeated with
the same smile. She nodded to Sanin, and turning swiftly, vanished
through the doorway, leaving behind her a fleeting but graceful impression
of a charming neck, exquisite shoulders, an exquisite figure.
Polozov got up, and rolling ponderously, went out by the same door.
Sanin did not doubt for a single second that his presence in ‘Prince Polozov’s’
drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its mistress;
the whole point of her entry had been the display of her hair, which was
certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted indeed at this freak on
the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she is anxious to impress
me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be accommodating
about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of Gemma that all other
women had absolutely no significance for him; he hardly noticed
them; and this time he went no further than thinking, ‘Yes, it was the
truth they told me; that lady’s really magnificent to look at!’
But had he not been in such an exceptional state of mind he would
most likely have expressed himself differently; Maria Nikolaevna Polozov,
by birth Kolishkin, was a very striking personality. And not that she
was of a beauty to which no exception could be taken; traces of her plebeian
origin were rather clearly apparent in her. Her forehead was low,
her nose rather fleshy and turned up; she could boast neither of the delicacy
of her skin nor of the elegance of her hands and feet – but what did
all that matter? Any one meeting her would not, to use Pushkin’s words,
have stood still before ‘the holy shrine of beauty,’ but before the sorcery
of a half-Russian, half-Gipsy woman’s body in its full flower and full
power … and he would have been nothing loath to stand still!
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