he had taken no gloves, and called the ubiquitous Pavel, who brought him a pair of white chamois-leather gloves, recently washed, every finger of which had stretched at the tip and looked like a finger-biscuit. Solomin stuffed the gloves into his pocket, and said they could drive on. Then the footman with a sudden, quite unnecessary swiftness leaped on to the box, the well-trained coachman gave a shrill whistle, and the horses went off at a trot.
While they were gradually carrying Solomin to Sipyagin's estate, that statesman was sitting in his drawing-room with a half-cut political pamphlet on his knee, talking about him to his wife. He confided to her that he had really written to him with the object of trying whether he couldn't entice him away from the merchant's factory to his own, as it was in a very bad way indeed, and radical reforms were needed! The idea that Solomin would refuse to come, or even fix another day, Sipyagin could not entertain for an instant; though he had himself offered Solomin a choice of days in his letter.
'But ours are paper-mills, not cotton-spinning, you know,' observed Valentina Mihalovna.
'It's all the same, my love; there's machinery in the one and machinery in the other . . . and he's a mechanician.'
'But perhaps he's a specialist, you know!'
37
