It even seemed to Serafima Aleksandrovna that she was in love with her future husband, and this made her happy.  He looked handsome and well-bred; his intelligent grey eyes always preserved a dignified expression; and he fulfilled his obligations of a fiance with irreproachable gentleness.

The bride was also good-looking; she was a tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl, somewhat timid but very tactful.  He was not after her dowry, though it pleased him to know that she had something.  He had connexions, and his wife came of good, influential people.  This might, at the proper opportunity, prove useful.  Always irreproachable and tactful, Nesletyev got on in his position not so fast that any one should envy him, nor yet so slow that he should envy any one else—­everything came in the proper measure and at the proper time.

After their marriage there was nothing in the manner of Sergey Modestovich to suggest anything wrong to his wife.  Later, however, when his wife was about to have a child, Sergey Modestovich established connexions elsewhere of a light and temporary nature.  Serafima Aleksandrovna found this out, and, to her own astonishment, was not particularly hurt; she awaited her infant with a restless anticipation that swallowed every other feeling.

A little girl was born; Serafima Aleksandrovna gave herself up to her.  At the beginning she used to tell her husband, with rapture, of all the joyous details of Lekchka’s existence.  But she soon found that he listened to her without the slightest interest, and only from the habit of politeness.  Serafima Aleksandrovna drifted farther and farther away from him.  She loved her little girl with the ungratified passion that other women, deceived in their husbands, show their chance young lovers.

“Mamochka, let’s play priatki” (hide and seek), cried Lelechka, pronouncing the r like the l, so that the word sounded “pliatki.”

This charming inability to speak always made, Serafima Aleksandrovna smile with tender rapture.  Lelechka then ran away, stamping with her plump little legs over the carpets, and hid herself behind the curtains near her bed.

“Tiu-tiu, mamochka!” she cried out in her sweet, laughing voice, as she looked out with a single roguish eye.

“Where is my baby girl?” the mother asked, as she looked for Lelechka and made believe that she did not see her.

And Lelechka poured out her rippling laughter in her hiding place.  Then she came out a little farther, and her mother, as though she had only just caught sight of her, seized her by her little shoulders and exclaimed joyously:  “Here she is, my Lelechka!”

Lelechka laughed long and merrily, her head close to her mother’s knees, and all of her cuddled up between her mother’s white hands.  Her mother’s eyes glowed with passionate emotion.

“Now, mamochka, you hide,” said Lelechka, as she ceased laughing.