Thick flaxen curls fell over her pretty rosy little face, and on to her large sleepy black eyes; she smiled and blinked her eyes at the light and laid a chubby little hand on her mother’s neck.

“Ada, vois, c’est ton pere,” said Varvara Pavlovna, pushing the curls back from her eyes and kissing her vigorously, “pre le avec moi.”

“C’est ca, papa?” stammered the little girl lisping.

“Oui, mon enfant, n’est-ce pas que tu l’aimes?”

But this was more than Lavretsky could stand.

“In such a melodrama must there really be a scene like this?” he muttered, and went out of the room.

Varvara Pavlovna stood still for some time in the same place, slightly shrugged her shoulders, carried the little girl off into the next room, undressed her and put her to bed.  Then she took up a book and sat down near the lamp, and after staying up for an hour she went to bed herself.

“Eh bien, madame?” queried her maid, a Frenchwoman whom she had brought from Paris, as she unlaced her corset.

“Eh bien, Justine,” se replied, “he is a good deal older, but I fancy he is just the same good-natured fellow.  Give me my gloves for the night, and get out my grey high-necked dress for to-morrow, and don’t forget the mutton cutlets for Ada . . . .  I daresay it will be difficult to get them here; but we must try.”

“A la guerre comme a la guerre,” replied Justine as she put out the candle.

Chapter XXXVII

For more than two hours Lavretsky wandered about the streets of town.  The night he had spent in the outskirts of Paris returned to his mind.  His heart was bursting and his head, dull and stunned, was filled again with the same dark senseless angry thoughts, constantly recurring.  “She is alive, she is here,” he muttered with ever fresh amazement.  He felt that he had lost Lisa.  His wrath choked him; this blow had fallen too suddenly upon him.  How could he so readily have believed in the nonsensical gossip of a journal, a wretched scrap of paper?  “Well, if I had not believed it,” he thought, “what difference would it have made?  I should not have known that Lisa loved me; she would not have known it herself.”  He could not rid himself of the image, the voice, the eyes of his wife . . . and he cursed himself, he cursed everything in the world.

Wearied out he went towards morning to Lemm’s.  For a long while he could make no one hear; at last at a window the old man’s head appeared in a nightcap, sour, wrinkled, and utterly unlike the inspired austere visage which twenty-four hours ago had looked down imperiously upon Lavretsky in all the dignity of artistic grandeur.

“What do you want?” queried Lemm.  “I can’t play to you every night, I have taken a decoction for a cold.”  But Lavretsky’s face, apparently, struck him as strange; the old man made a shade for his eyes with his hand, took a look at his elated visitor, and let him in.