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Lydia walked with her usual brisk, even tread, carrying herself with the smooth, elastic bearing and graceful swing of her beautiful body that Ivanov remembered so well. She raised the piano-cover and began playing a dashing bravura that was strikingly out of place in the dismantled room, then she closed the piano-lid with a slam. Aganka entered with the tea on a tray.
Then he went to his piano, raised the cover in an abstracted sort of way, tried to search out in his memory the melody of Tchaikóvsky's romance; but he immediately banged to the piano-lid with vexation and went to his aunt, in her own room, which was always kept very hot, and was forever redolent of mint, sage, and other medicinal herbs, and crowded with such a multitude of rugs, étagères, little benches, cushions and various articles of softly-stuffed furniture that it was difficult for an inexperienced person to turn round in it, and breathing was oppressive.
Carewe, who sat upon the veranda consulting a brown Principe, and less that the intended insult was accomplished. For an expression of a vindictive nature was precipitated in that quarter so simultaneously that the bang of the piano-lid and the curse were even as the report of a musket and the immediate cry of the wounded. Mrs.
Rozenoffski gave a masterly start of surprise, and turned his leonine head in dazed bewilderment. Was he not then alone? 'Gott im Himmel! he murmured, and, furiously banging down the piano-lid, stalked from these presumptuous mortals who had jarred the artist's soliloquy.
"Don't worry," he said; "put a prop under your piano-lid and bring me a chair. I'll work the ivories for you." He played till midnight, drank his free beers between each selection, his face as grave as a judge except when he would wink at me out of the corner of his eye to show his intense enjoyment of the whole situation.
It was equally certain that this prolonged recital of slow movements was intended to produce in his mind a vivid consciousness of the contrast between the romp last night and the present tranquil hour, and it did not fail in this respect. Lucia shut the piano-lid, and almost before they had given their sighs, spoke. "I think I will have a little dinner-party first," she said.
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