And everything that was said at the time was uninteresting, unjust, and stupid; he felt irritated and disturbed, but held his tongue, and, because he sat glumly silent and looked at his plate, he was nicknamed in the town “the haughty Pole,” though he never had been a Pole.

All such entertainments as theatres and concerts he declined, but he played vint every evening for three hours with enjoyment.  He had another diversion to which he took imperceptibly, little by little:  in the evening he would take out of his pockets the notes he had gained by his practice, and sometimes there were stuffed in his pockets notes—­yellow and green, and smelling of scent and vinegar and incense and fish oil—­up to the value of seventy roubles; and when they amounted to some hundreds he took them to the Mutual Credit Bank and deposited the money there to his account.

He was only twice at the Turkins’ in the course of the four years after Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away, on each occasion at the invitation of Vera Iosifovna, who was still undergoing treatment for migraine.  Every summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to stay with her parents, but he did not once see her; it somehow never happened.

But now four years had passed.  One still, warm morning a letter was brought to the hospital.  Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionitch that she was missing him very much, and begged him to come and see them, and to relieve her sufferings; and, by the way, it was her birthday.  Below was a postscript:  “I join in mother’s request.—­ K.”

Startsev considered, and in the evening he went to the Turkins’.

“How do you do, if you please?” Ivan Petrovitch met him, smiling with his eyes only.  “Bongjour.”

Vera Iosifovna, white-haired and looking much older, shook Startsev’s hand, sighed affectedly, and said: 

“You don’t care to pay attentions to me, doctor.  You never come and see us; I am too old for you.  But now some one young has come; perhaps she will be more fortunate.”

And Kitten?  She had grown thinner, paler, had grown handsomer and more graceful; but now she was Ekaterina Ivanovna, not Kitten; she had lost the freshness and look of childish naivete.  And in her expression and manners there was something new—­guilty and diffident, as though she did not feel herself at home here in the Turkins’ house.

“How many summers, how many winters!” she said, giving Startsev her hand, and he could see that her heart was beating with excitement; and looking at him intently and curiously, she went on:  “How much stouter you are!  You look sunburnt and more manly, but on the whole you have changed very little.”

Now, too, he thought her attractive, very attractive, but there was something lacking in her, or else something superfluous—­he could not himself have said exactly what it was, but something prevented him from feeling as before.  He did not like her pallor, her new expression, her faint smile, her voice, and soon afterwards he disliked her clothes, too, the low chair in which she was sitting; he disliked something in the past when he had almost married her.  He thought of his love, of the dreams and the hopes which had troubled him four years before—­and he felt awkward.