“Well, Christmas will soon be here,” the father said in a pleasant sing-song voice, rolling a cigarette of dark reddish tobacco.  “It doesn’t seem long since the summer, when mamma was crying at your going . . . and here you are back again. . . .  Time flies, my boy.  Before you have time to cry out, old age is upon you.  Mr. Lentilov, take some more, please help yourself!  We don’t stand on ceremony!”

Volodya’s three sisters, Katya, Sonya, and Masha (the eldest was eleven), sat at the table and never took their eyes off the newcomer.

Lentilov was of the same height and age as Volodya, but not as round-faced and fair-skinned.  He was thin, dark, and freckled; his hair stood up like a brush, his eyes were small, and his lips were thick.  He was, in fact, distinctly ugly, and if he had not been wearing the school uniform, he might have been taken for the son of a cook.  He seemed morose, did not speak, and never once smiled.  The little girls, staring at him, immediately came to the conclusion that he must be a very clever and learned person.  He seemed to be thinking about something all the time, and was so absorbed in his own thoughts, that, whenever he was spoken to, he started, threw his head back, and asked to have the question repeated.

The little girls noticed that Volodya, who had always been so merry and talkative, also said very little, did not smile at all, and hardly seemed to be glad to be home.  All the time they were at tea he only once addressed his sisters, and then he said something so strange.  He pointed to the samovar and said: 

“In California they don’t drink tea, but gin.”

He, too, seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, and, to judge by the looks that passed between him and his friend Lentilov, their thoughts were the same.

After tea, they all went into the nursery.  The girls and their father took up the work that had been interrupted by the arrival of the boys.  They were making flowers and frills for the Christmas tree out of paper of different colours.  It was an attractive and noisy occupation.  Every fresh flower was greeted by the little girls with shrieks of delight, even of awe, as though the flower had dropped straight from heaven; their father was in ecstasies too, and every now and then he threw the scissors on the floor, in vexation at their bluntness.  Their mother kept running into the nursery with an anxious face, asking: 

“Who has taken my scissors?  Ivan Nikolaitch, have you taken my scissors again?”

“Mercy on us!  I’m not even allowed a pair of scissors!” their father would respond in a lachrymose voice, and, flinging himself back in his chair, he would pretend to be a deeply injured man; but a minute later, he would be in ecstasies again.

On his former holidays Volodya, too, had taken part in the preparations for the Christmas tree, or had been running in the yard to look at the snow mountain that the watchman and the shepherd were building.  But this time Volodya and Lentilov took no notice whatever of the coloured paper, and did not once go into the stable.  They sat in the window and began whispering to one another; then they opened an atlas and looked carefully at a map.