“Yes, that is true,” said Nekhludoff.  “One often feels his—­feels that he has no right to judge others.”

“Comme c’est vrai!” she exclaimed, as if struck by the truth of the remark, and, as usual, artfully flattering her friend.

“And what about your picture?  It interests me very much,” she added.  “Were it not for my indisposition, I should have visited you long ago.”

“I have given up painting entirely,” he answered dryly.  Her unjust flattery was as apparent to him to-day as was her age, which she attempted to conceal.  Try as he would, he could not force himself to be pleasant.

“It is too bad!  You know, Riepin himself told me that Nekhludoff possesses undoubted talent,” she said, turning to Kolosoff.

“What a shameless liar!” Nekhludoff thought, frowning.

Seeing that Nekhludoff was in ill humor, and could not be drawn into pleasant and clear conversation, Sophia Vasilievna turned to Kolosoff for his opinion of the new drama, with an air as if Kolosoff’s opinion would dispel all doubt and every word of his was destined to become immortalized.  Kolosoff condemned the drama and took occasion to state his views on art.  The correctness of his views seemed to impress her; she attempted to defend the author of the drama, but immediately yielded, or found a middle ground.  Nekhludoff looked and listened and yet saw and heard but little.

Listening now to Sophia Vasilievna, now to Kolosoff, Nekhludoff saw, first, that neither of them cared either for the drama or for each other, and that they were talking merely to satisfy a physiological craving to exercise, after dinner, the muscles of the tongue and throat.  Secondly, he saw that Kolosoff, who had drunk brandy, wine and liquors, was somewhat tipsy—­not as drunk as a drinking peasant, but like a man to whom wine-drinking has become a habit.  He did not reel, nor did he talk nonsense, but was in an abnormal, excited and contented condition.  Thirdly, Nekhludoff saw that Princess Sophia Vasilievna, during the conversation, now and again anxiously glanced at the window, through which a slanting ray of the sun was creeping toward her, threatening to throw too much light on her aged face.

“How true it is,” she said of some remark of Kolosoff, and pressed a button on the wall near the couch.

At this moment the doctor rose with as little ceremony as one of the family, and walked out of the room.  Sophia Vasilievna followed him with her eyes.

“Please, Phillip, let down that curtain,” she said to the fine-looking servant who responded to the bell, her eyes pointing to the window.

“Say what you will, but there is something mystical about him, and without mysticism there is no poetry,” she said, with one black eye angrily following the movements of the servant who was lowering the curtain.

“Mysticism without poetry is superstition, and poetry without mysticism is prose,” she continued, smiling sadly, still keeping her eye on the servant, who was smoothing down the curtain.