“There is nothing surprising in that.  To know Anna Akimovna at your age and not to be in love with her, that would be impossible.”

“I adore her,” the lawyer continued with perfect sincerity, but with his usual indolent grace.  “I love her, but not because I am a man and she is a woman.  When I am with her I always feel as though she belongs to some third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away together into the domain of the subtlest shades, and there we blend into the spectrum.  Leconte de Lisle defines such relations better than any one.  He has a superb passage, a marvellous passage. . . .”

Lysevitch rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not finding the quotation, subsided.  They began talking of the weather, of the opera, of the arrival, expected shortly, of Duse.  Anna Akimovna remembered that the year before Lysevitch and, she fancied, Krylin had dined with her, and now when they were getting ready to go away, she began with perfect sincerity pointing out to them in an imploring voice that as they had no more visits to pay, they ought to remain to dinner with her.  After some hesitation the visitors agreed.

In addition to the family dinner, consisting of cabbage soup, sucking pig, goose with apples, and so on, a so-called “French” or “chef’s” dinner used to be prepared in the kitchen on great holidays, in case any visitor in the upper story wanted a meal.  When they heard the clatter of crockery in the dining-room, Lysevitch began to betray a noticeable excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his eyes, and described with feeling what dinners her father and uncle used to give at one time, and a marvellous matelote of turbots the cook here could make:  it was not a matelote, but a veritable revelation!  He was already gloating over the dinner, already eating it in imagination and enjoying it.  When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his mouth; he positively purred with pleasure.  He munched loudly, disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily and rapacious.

The hors d’oeuvres were superb; among other things, there were fresh white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce provencale made of fried oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter pickles.  The dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was excellent, and so were the wines.  Mishenka waited at table with enthusiasm.  When he laid some new dish on the table and lifted the shining cover, or poured out the wine, he did it with the solemnity of a professor of black magic, and, looking at his face and his movements suggesting the first figure of a quadrille, the lawyer thought several times, “What a fool!”

After the third course Lysevitch said, turning to Anna Akimovna: