Mariette, graceful, slight, elegant, her low-necked dress showing her firm, shapely, slanting shoulders, with a little black mole where they joined her neck, immediately turned, and pointed with her face to a chair behind her in an engaging manner, and smiled a smile that seemed full of meaning to Nekhludoff.

The husband looked at him in the quiet way in which he did everything, and bowed.  In the look he exchanged with his wife, the master, the owner of a beautiful woman, was to be seen at once.

When the monologue was over the theatre resounded with the clapping of hands.  Mariette rose, and holding up her rustling silk skirt, went into the back of the box and introduced Nekhludoff to her husband.

The General, without ceasing to smile with his eyes, said he was very pleased, and then sat inscrutably silent.

“I ought to have left to-day, had I not promised,” said Nekhludoff to Mariette.

“If you do not care to see me,” said Mariette, in answer to what his words implied, “you will see a wonderful actress.  Was she not splendid in the last scene?” she asked, turning to her husband.

The husband bowed his head.

“This sort of thing does not touch me,” said Nekhludoff.  “I have seen so much real suffering lately that—­”

“Yes, sit down and tell me.”

The husband listened, his eyes smiling more and more ironically.  “I have been to see that woman whom they have set free, and who has been kept in prison for so long; she is quite broken down.”

“That is the woman I spoke to you about,” Mariette said to her husband.

“Oh, yes, I was very pleased that she could be set free,” said the husband quietly, nodding and smiling under his moustache with evident irony, so it seemed to Nekhludoff.  “I shall go and have a smoke.”

Nekhludoff sat waiting to hear what the something was that Mariette had to tell him.  She said nothing, and did not even try to say anything, but joked and spoke about the performance, which she thought ought to touch Nekhludoff.  Nekhludoff saw that she had nothing to tell, but only wished to show herself to him in all the splendour of her evening toilet, with her shoulders and little mole; and this was pleasant and yet repulsive to him.

The charm that had veiled all this sort of thing from Nekhludoff was not removed, but it was as if he could see what lay beneath.  Looking at Mariette, he admired her, and yet he knew that she was a liar, living with a husband who was making his career by means of the tears and lives of hundreds and hundreds of people, and that she was quite indifferent about it, and that all she had said the day before was untrue.  What she wanted—­neither he nor she knew why—­was to make him fall in love with her.  This both attracted and disgusted him.  Several times, on the point of going away, he took up his hat, and then stayed on.