of a voice, it would sing precisely like that worthy! And Skoropihin even—you know our time-honoured Aristarchus—praises him! It's something, he declares, quite unlike Western art! He praises our miserable painters too! He used once to rave, he says, over Europe, over the Italians; but he has heard Rossini and thought: "Pooh, pooh!" he has seen Raphael—"Pooh, pooh!" And that "pooh" is quite enough for our young men; they repeat "pooh" after Skoropihin, and they're contented if you please! And meanwhile the people's poverty is fearful, they are utterly crushed by taxes, and the only reform that's been accomplished is that all peasants have taken to caps while their wives have given up coifs.. . . And the famine! The drunkenness! The usurers!'
But at this point Mashurina yawned, and Paklin saw he must change the subject.
'You have not yet told me,' he said to her, 'where you have been these two years, and whether you have been here long, and what you have been doing and how you came to be transformed into an Italian, and why———'
'There's no need for you to know all that,' Mashurina interrupted; 'what's the use? That's not in your line now.'
Paklin felt a pang, and to hide his confusion he laughed a short, forced little laugh.
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