came in again.  “Madame Borozdina?  Tell her, tomorrow at two o’clock.  Yes,” she said, putting her finger in the place in the book, and gazing before her with her fine pensive eyes, “that is how true faith acts.  You know Marie Sanina?  You know about her trouble?  She lost her only child.  She was in despair.  And what happened?  She found this comforter, and she thanks God now for the death of her child.  Such is the happiness faith brings!”

“Oh, yes, that is most...” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, glad they were going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties.  “No, I see I’d better not ask her about anything today,” he thought.  “If only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!”

“It will be dull for you,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, addressing Landau; “you don’t know English, but it’s short.”

“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau, with the same smile, and he closed his eyes.  Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaningful glances, and the reading began.

Chapter 22

Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk which he was hearing for the first time.  The complexity of Petersburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his Moscow stagnation.  But he liked these complications, and understood them only in the circles he knew and was at home in.  In these unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not get his bearings.  As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of the beautiful, artless—­or perhaps artful, he could not decide which—­eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head.  “Marie Sanina is glad her child’s dead....  How good a smoke would be now!...  To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know....  And why is my head so heavy?  Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer?  Anyway, I fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so far.  But anyway, it won’t do to ask her now.  They say they make one say one’s prayers.  I only hope they won’t make me!  That’ll be too imbecile.  And what stuff it is she’s reading! but she has a good accent.  Landau—­Bezzubov—­ what’s he Bezzubov for?” All at once Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw was uncontrollably forming a yawn.  He pulled his whiskers to cover the yawn, and shook himself together.  But soon after he became aware that he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring.  He recovered himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna was saying “he’s asleep.”  Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay, feeling guilty and caught.  But he was reassured at once by seeing that the words “he’s asleep” referred not to him, but to Landau.  The Frenchman was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch.  But Stepan Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have offended them, as he thought (though even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted them extremely, especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.