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Updated: June 7, 2025
Nejdanov followed the stream up the wide stairs. As soon as they reached the hall, Sipiagin, who had been searching for Nejdanov with his eyes, introduced him to his wife, Anna Zaharovna, and Mariana, and said to Kolia, "This is your tutor. Mind you do as he tells you. Give him your hand."
On the stroke of five Nejdanov went down to dinner, which was announced by a Chinese gong, not by a bell. The whole company was already assembled in the dining room. Sipiagin welcomed him again from behind his high cravat, and showed him to a place between Anna Zaharovna and Kolia.
"But I can't stay here any longer! I am being insulted by everybody. Only today that idiot Anna Zaharovna said before Kolia, alluding to my father, that a bad tree does not bring forth good fruit! Kolia was even surprised, and asked what it meant. Not to speak of Valentina Mihailovna!" Solomin stopped her again, this time with a smile.
She announced, with a smile, that in this subject she needed instruction almost as much as Kolia. She conducted herself just as quietly as she had done at the first lesson. Between two and five o'clock Nejdanov stayed in his own room writing letters to his St. Petersburg friends. He was neither bored nor in despair; his overstrained nerves had calmed down somewhat.
A pretty curly-haired boy of about nine burst into the room and stopped suddenly on catching sight of her. He was dressed in a Highland costume, his legs bare, and was very much befrizzled and pomaded. "What do you want, Kolia?" Valentina Mihailovna asked. Her voice was as soft and velvety as her eyes.
"A most worthy pastor!" "Most worthy!" Father Kiprian agreed; "only he puts too much faith in the ecclesiastical superintendents!" Soon after this the clergy took their leave. Kolia, in his new coat decorated with golden buttons, was the hero of the day.
He pronounced the word "science" with emotion, and finished his speech by the Latin exclamation, laboremus! which he instantly translated into Russian. Kolia, with a glass in his hand, went over to thank his father and to be kissed by the others. Nejdanov exchanged glances with Mariana again... They no doubt felt the same, but they did not speak to each other.
Under the influence of such hostile and irritable sensations, the statesman en herbe was even more unsympathetic and distant in his intercourse with Nejdanov. He told Kolia that he need not take lessons that day and that he must try to be more independent in future. He did not, however, dismiss the tutor himself as the latter had expected, but continued to ignore him.
Valentina Mihailovna, standing in front, waved her pocket handkerchief, Kolia shrieked with delight, the coachman adroitly pulled up the steaming horses, a footman came down headlong from the box and almost pulled the carriage door off its hinges in his effort to open it and then, with a condescending smile on his lips, in his eyes, over the whole of his face, Boris Andraevitch, with one graceful gesture of the shoulders, dropped his cloak and sprang to the ground.
Mariana looked stern and serious as usual. Exactly at ten o'clock Nejdanov gave Kolia his first lesson before Valentina Mihailovna, who had asked him if she might be present, and sat very quietly the whole time.
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