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Updated: June 16, 2025
Vera Lvovna was silent, as usual; and soon went to see Natasha. Polunin also was quiet, walking about the room with his hands behind his back. Kseniya Ippolytovna jested in a wilful, merry, and coquettish fashion with Arkhipov, who answered her in a polite, serious, and punctilious manner. He was unable to carry on a light, witty conversation, and was acutely conscious of his own awkwardness.
"Supposing a distracted woman who desired to be pure were to come and ask you for a baby would you give her the same answer as Polunin? He said it was impossible, that it was sin, that he loved someone else. Would you answer like that, Arkhipov, knowing it was the woman's last her only chance of salvation her only love?" She looked eagerly from one to the other.
At half past eleven a footman opened the door leading into the dining-room and solemnly announced that supper was served. They supped and toasted, ate and drank amid the clatter of knives, forks, dishes, and spoons. Kseniya made Arkhipov, Polunin, a General and a Magistrate sit beside her.
"That is a law!" The women began to argue. Then the dispute died down. Arkhipov proposed a game of chance. They uncovered a green table, set lighted candles at its corners and commenced to play leisurely and silently as in winter. Arkhipov sat erect, resting his elbows at right angles on the table.
"No, certainly not I should answer in a different way," Arkhipov replied quietly. "And you, Vera Lvovna, a wife ... do you hear? I speak in front of you?" Vera Lvovna nodded, laid her hand gently on Kseniya's forehead, and answered softly and tenderly: "I understand you perfectly." Again Kseniya wept. The dawn trod gently down the lanes of darkness.
From a mere trifle, something Kseniya Ippolytovna said about fortune-telling at Christmas, there arose an old-standing dispute between the two men on Belief and Unbelief. Arkhipov spoke with calmness and conviction, but Polunin grew angry, confused, and agitated.
They rang out near the farm, were heard descending into a hollow; then, as the horses commenced to trot, they jingled briskly into the country, their echoes at last dying away beyond the common. Polunin and his guest, Arkhipov, were playing chess in his study. Vera Lvovna was minding the infant; she talked with Alena for a while; then went into the drawing-room, and rummaged among the books there.
The telegraph-post stood close beside it, and its wires hummed ceaselessly in the room somewhere in a corner of the ceiling a monotonous, barely audible sound, like a snow-storm. The two men sat in silence, Polunin broad-shouldered and bearded, Arkhipov lean, wiry, and bald. Alena entered bringing in curdled milk and cheese-cakes.
Arkhipov declared that Faith was unnecessary and injurious, like instinct and every other sentiment; that there was only one thing immutable Intellect. Only that was moral which was intelligent. Polunin retorted that the intellectual and the non-intellectual were no standard of life, for was life intelligent? he asked.
"On the watch?" "Yes." "I have only just arrived home. The storm whirled madly round us in the fields, and the roads were invisible, frozen under snow ... I drove on thinking, and thinking of the snow, you, myself, Arkhipov, Paris ... oh, Paris...! You are not angry with me for ringing you up, are you, my ascetic?... I was thinking of our conversation." "What were you thinking?"
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