a ruined man, Alexandre Alexandrovich,” Pavel said impetuously. “I don’t see why it should be too late to straighten it all out. I’m going to see my uncle. Or, better still, my mother will see him. We can’t let it go that way. We should all be a lot of scoundrels if we did. I’m going to tell him so.” “Do it, prince, if you can,” the old man said with shamefaced eagerness. “I shall never forget it.” When Pavel came home he found his mother’s sleigh in front of the main entrance, her coachman in dazzling attire, waiting with pompous stolidity. When the liveried porter threw the door open to him and he entered the vestibule he saw coming down the immense staircase his mother and his five-year-old half-brother, Kostia, dressed for their afternoon drive, Anna Nicolayevna in her furs and the little fellow in the costume of a Caucasian horseman, which became his grave little face charmingly. Following at some distance, with a smile of admiration, half servile, half sincere, on her fresh German face, was Kostia’s governess. She was not dressed for a drive. She was merely going to see her charge off. [23] [23] “Mother, I am afraid I shall have to detain you,” Pavel said, solemnly. “I wish to speak to you about Alexandre Alexandrovich.” “Won’t it keep?” she asked, with a facetious gesture. “Don’t make fun of it, mother,” he reproached her. “It’s a serious matter. My head is in a whirl.” Kostia was burning to show himself in public in his new Circassian cap and when he saw his mother yield he screwed up his face for a cry, but he forthwith straightened it out again. He scarcely ever cried in Pavel’s presence for fear of being called “damsel” by him—an appellation he dreaded more than being locked up alone in the schoolroom. They went into Anna Nicolayevna’s favorite sitting-room, a square chamber furnished and decorated in tan, in no particular style, but with an eye to the combined suggestions of old-time solidity and latter-day elegance. It was the embodiment of rest and silence, an effect to which two life-sized bronze statues—a Diana and a Venus de Medici—and the drowsy ticking of an ancient clock contributed not a little. It was known as the English room because its former furnishings had been modelled after London standards. Pavel painted Pievakin as a penitent, broken spirit
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