Nekhludoff said he would come at once, and having put the papers back into the portfolio, he went up to his aunt’s.  He looked out of a window on his way, and saw Mariette’s pair of bays standing in front of the house, and he suddenly brightened and felt inclined to smile.

Mariette, with a hat on her head, not in black but with a light dress of many shades, sat with a cup in her hand beside the Countess’s easy chair, prattling about something while her beautiful, laughing eyes glistened.  She had said something funny—­something indecently funny—­just as Nekhludoff entered the room.  He knew it by the way she laughed, and by the way the good-natured Countess Katerina Ivanovna’s fat body was shaking with laughter; while Mariette, her smiling mouth slightly drawn to one side, her head a little bent, a peculiarly mischievous expression in her merry, energetic face, sat silently looking at her companion.  From a few words which he overheard, Nekhludoff guessed that they were talking of the second piece of Petersburg news, the episode of the Siberian Governor, and that it was in reference to this subject that Mariette had said something so funny that the Countess could not control herself for a long time.

“You will kill me,” she said, coughing.

After saying “How d’you do?” Nekhludoff sat down.  He was about to censure Mariette in his mind for her levity when, noticing the serious and even slightly dissatisfied look in his eyes, she suddenly, to please him, changed not only the expression of her face, but also the attitude of her mind; for she felt the wish to please him as soon as she looked at him.  She suddenly turned serious, dissatisfied with her life, as if seeking and striving after something; it was not that she pretended, but she really reproduced in herself the very same state of mind that he was in, although it would have been impossible for her to express in words what was the state of Nekhludoff’s mind at that moment.

She asked him how he had accomplished his tasks.  He told her about his failure in the Senate and his meeting Selenin.

“Oh, what a pure soul!  He is, indeed, a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.  A pure soul!” said both ladies, using the epithet commonly applied to Selenin in Petersburg society.

“What is his wife like?” Nekhludoff asked.

“His wife?  Well, I do not wish to judge, but she does not understand him.”

“Is it possible that he, too, was for rejecting the appeal?” Mariette asked with real sympathy.  “It is dreadful.  How sorry I am for her,” she added with a sigh.

He frowned, and in order to change the subject began to speak about Shoustova, who had been imprisoned in the fortress and was now set free through the influence of Mariette’s husband.  He thanked her for her trouble, and was going on to say how dreadful he thought it, that this woman and the whole of her family had suffered merely, because no one had reminded the authorities about them, but Mariette interrupted him and expressed her own indignation.