“How do you do, if you please?” said Ivan Petrovitch, meeting him on the steps.  “Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor.  Come along; I will introduce you to my better half.  I tell him, Verotchka,” he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife—­“I tell him that he has no human right to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society.  Oughtn’t he, darling?”

“Sit here,” said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her.  “You can dance attendance on me.  My husband is jealous—­he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing.”

“Ah, you spoilt chicken!” Ivan Petrovitch muttered tenderly, and he kissed her on the forehead.  “You have come just in the nick of time,” he said, addressing the doctor again.  “My better half has written a ‘hugeous’ novel, and she is going to read it aloud to-day.”

“Petit Jean,” said Vera Iosifovna to her husband, “dites que l’on nous donne du the.”

Startsev was introduced to Ekaterina Ivanovna, a girl of eighteen, very much like her mother, thin and pretty.  Her expression was still childish and her figure was soft and slim; and her developed girlish bosom, healthy and beautiful, was suggestive of spring, real spring.

Then they drank tea with jam, honey, and sweetmeats, and with very nice cakes, which melted in the mouth.  As the evening came on, other visitors gradually arrived, and Ivan Petrovitch fixed his laughing eyes on each of them and said: 

“How do you do, if you please?”

Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces, and Vera Iosifovna read her novel.  It began like this:  “The frost was intense. . . .”  The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions. . . .  It was comfortable in the soft deep arm-chair; the lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and laughter floated in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was difficult to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain.  Vera Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess founded a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and fell in love with a wandering artist; she read of what never happens in real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen—­it was comfortable, and such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind, one had no desire to get up.

“Not badsome . . .”  Ivan Petrovitch said softly.

And one of the visitors hearing, with his thoughts far away, said hardly audibly: 

“Yes . . . truly. . . .”

One hour passed, another.  In the town gardens close by a band was playing and a chorus was singing.  When Vera Iosifovna shut her manuscript book, the company was silent for five minutes, listening to “Lutchina” being sung by the chorus, and the song gave what was not in the novel and is in real life.