How much that year '56 meant! Three years before no one had been thinking of the Labázovs, and if any one recalled them, it was with that unaccountable feeling of dread with which one speaks of one lately dead; but now they vividly recalled all the former relations, all the beautiful qualities, and each lady was making a plan for getting the monopoly of the Labázovs, in order to treat the other guests to them. "Their son and their daughter have come with them," said Pákhtin. "If they are only as handsome as their mother used to be," said Countess Fuks. "Still, their father, too, was very, very handsome." "How could they educate their children there?" asked the hostess. "They say, nicely. They say that the young man is as nice, as amiable, and as cultured as though he had been brought up in Paris." "I predict great success to that young person," said a homely spinster. "All those Siberian ladies have something pleasantly trivial about them, which everybody, however, likes." "Yes, yes," said another spinster. "Here we have another rich prospective bride," said a third spinster. The old colonel, of German origin, who had come to Moscow three years before, in order to marry a rich girl, decided as quickly as possible, before the young people knew anything about it, to present himself and propose. But the spinsters and ladies thought almost the same about the young Siberian. "No doubt that is the one I am destined to marry," thought a spinster who had been going out for eight years. "No doubt it was for the best that that stupid officer of the Chevalier Guards did not propose to me. I should certainly have been unhappy." "Well, they will again grow yellow with envy, if this one, too, falls in love with me," thought a young and pretty lady. We hear much about the provincialism of small towns,--but there is nothing worse than the provincialism of the upper classes. There are no new persons there, and society is prepared to receive all kinds of new persons, if they should make their appearance; but they are rarely, very rarely, recognized as belonging to their circle and accepted, as was the case with the Labázovs, and the sensation produced by them is stronger than in a provincial town. III. "This is Moscow, white-stoned Mother Moscow," said Peter Ivánovich, rubbing his eyes in the morning, and listening to the tolling of the bells which was proceeding from Gazette Lane. Nothing so vividly resurrects the past as sounds, and these sounds of the Moscow bells, combined with the sight of a white wall opposite the window, and with the rumbling of wheels, so vividly reminded him not only of the Moscow which he had known thirty-five years before, but also of the Moscow with the Kremlin, with the palaces, with Iván the bell, and so forth, which he had been carrying in his heart, that he experienced a childish joy at being a Russian, and in Moscow.