“Ah, he would like to see it in all its glory!  Let him do so.  I have written about it and no attention has been paid to it.  Let him find out from foreign publications,” the General said, and went up to the dinner table, where the mistress of the house was showing the visitors their places.  Nekhludoff sat between his hostess and the Englishman.  In front of him sat the General’s daughter and the ex-director of the Government department in Petersburg.  The conversation at dinner was carried on by fits and starts, now it was India that the Englishman talked about, now the Tonkin expedition that the General strongly disapproved of, now the universal bribery and corruption in Siberia.  All these topics did not interest Nekhludoff much.

But after dinner, over their coffee, Nekhludoff and the Englishman began a very interesting conversation about Gladstone, and Nekhludoff thought he had said many clever things which were noticed by his interlocutor.  And Nekhludoff felt it more and more pleasant to be sipping his coffee seated in an easy-chair among amiable, well-bred people.  And when at the Englishman’s request the hostess went up to the piano with the ex-director of the Government department, and they began to play in well-practised style Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Nekhludoff fell into a mental state of perfect self-satisfaction to which he had long been a stranger, as though he had only just found out what a good fellow he was.

The grand piano was a splendid instrument, the symphony was well performed.  At least, so it seemed to Nekhludoff, who knew and liked that symphony.  Listening to the beautiful andante, he felt a tickling in his nose, he was so touched by his many virtues.

Nekhludoff thanked his hostess for the enjoyment that he had been deprived of for so long, and was about to say goodbye and go when the daughter of the house came up to him with a determined look and said, with a blush, “You asked about my children.  Would you like to see them?”

“She thinks that everybody wants to see her children,” said her mother, smiling at her daughter’s winning tactlessness.  “The Prince is not at all interested.”

“On the contrary, I am very much interested,” said Nekhludoff, touched by this overflowing, happy mother-love.  “Please let me see them.”

“She’s taking the Prince to see her babies,” the General shouted, laughing from the card-table, where he sat with his son-in-law, the mine owner and the aide-de-camp.  “Go, go, pay your tribute.”

The young woman, visibly excited by the thought that judgment was about to be passed on her children, went quickly towards the inner apartments, followed by Nekhludoff.  In the third, a lofty room, papered with white and lit up by a shaded lamp, stood two small cots, and a nurse with a white cape on her shoulders sat between the cots.  She had a kindly, true Siberian face, with its high cheek-bones.

The nurse rose and bowed.  The mother stooped over the first cot, in which a two-year-old little girl lay peacefully sleeping with her little mouth open and her long, curly hair tumbled over the pillow.