slowly; 'she had no right to do that.. . . Well, never mind! Tell me, tell me everything.'
Nezhdanov began talking.. . . Marianna listened to him with a sort of stony attention, and only interrupted him when she noticed that he was hurrying things over, slurring over incidents. All the details of his visits were not however of equal interest to her; she laughed over Fomushka and Fimushka, but they did not interest her. Their life was too remote from her.
'It 's just as if you were telling me about Nebuchadnezzar,' was her comment.
But what Markelov said, what Golushkin even thought (though she soon realised what sort of a creature he was), and, above all, what were Solomin's ideas, and what he was like—these were the points she wanted to hear about, and took to heart. 'When? when?'—that was the question that was continually in her head and on her lips when Nezhdanov was talking, while he seemed to avoid everything which could give a positive answer to that question. He began to notice himself that he laid stress precisely on those incidents which were of least interest to Marianna . . . and was constantly returning to them. Humorous descriptions made her impatient; a sceptical or dejected tone wounded her. . . . He had con-
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