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By the table, on a low, soft, easy chair, next to Sophia Vasilievna, sat Kolosoff, stirring his coffee. A glass of liqueur stood on the table. Missy came in with Nekhludoff, but did not remain in the room.
And this he feared more than anything else to-day, so he silently followed her to the door of the Princess' apartments. Princess Sophia Vasilievna had finished her meal of choice and nourishing dishes, which she always took alone, that no one might see her performing that unpoetical function. A cup of coffee stood on a small table near her couch, and she was smoking a cigarette.
By a strange coincidence on that very morning he received the long-expected letter from Mary Vasilievna, the wife of the Marechal de Noblesse, the very letter he particularly needed. She gave him full freedom, and wished him happiness in his intended marriage. "Marriage!" he repeated with irony. "How far I am from all that at present."
Sit down and talk," said Princess Sophia Vasilievna, with her affected but very naturally-acted smile, showing her fine, long teeth a splendid imitation of what her own had once been. "I hear that you have come from the Law Courts very much depressed. I think it must be very trying to a person with a heart," she added in French. "Yes, that is so," said Nekhludoff.
He had sunk in it, became accustomed to it, and indulged himself in it. The questions that absorbed him now were: How to break loose from Maria Vasilievna and her husband, so that he might be able to look them in the face? How, without falsehood, to disentangle his relations with Missy?
"At any cost I will break this lie which binds me and confess everything, and will tell everybody the truth, and act the truth," he said resolutely, aloud. "I shall tell Missy the truth, tell her I am a profligate and cannot marry her, and have only uselessly upset her. I shall tell Mary Vasilievna. . . Oh, there is nothing to tell her.
And, suddenly, he understood that the aversion he had lately, and particularly to-day, felt for everybody the Prince and Sophia Vasilievna and Corney and Missy was an aversion for himself. And, strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting. More than once in Nekhludoff's life there had been what he called a "cleansing of the soul."
As I stand thinking of these things, there come dropping on to my head from above the low-spoken, ashen-grey words: "The chief conspirator in the matter was her lover, the son of a priest. He it was who engineered the plot. He has been sentenced to ten years penal servitude." "And she?" "Tatiana Vasilievna? To the same, and I also. I leave for Siberia the day after tomorrow.
At this moment the doctor rose with as little ceremony as one of the family, and walked out of the room. Sophia Vasilievna followed him with her eyes. "Please, Phillip, let down that curtain," she said to the fine-looking servant who responded to the bell, her eyes pointing to the window.
"Philip, not that curtain; the one on the large window," she exclaimed, in a suffering tone. Sophia Vasilievna was evidently pitying herself for having to make the effort of saying these words; and, to soothe her feelings, she raised to her lips a scented, smoking cigarette with her jewel- bedecked fingers.
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