"How fresh you still are!" he said. "Evidently Siberia is better than St. Petersburg. These are your family,--introduce me to them! What a fine fellow your son is! So to dinner to-morrow?" "Yes, yes, by all means." On the porch they met the famous Chikháev, another old acquaintance. "How did you find out that I had arrived?" "It would be a shame for Moscow if it did not know it. It is a shame that you were not met at the barrier. Where do you dine? No doubt with your sister, Márya Ivánovna. Very well, I shall be there myself." Peter Ivánovich always had the aspect of a proud man for one who could not through that exterior make out the expression of unspeakable goodness and impressionableness; but just then even Márya Nikoláevna was delighted to see his unwonted dignity, and Sónya Petróvna smiled with her eyes, as she looked at him. They arrived at the house of Márya Ivánovna. Márya Ivánovna was Peter Ivánovich's godmother and ten years his senior. She was an old maid. Her history, why she did not get married, and how she had passed her youth, I will tell some time later. She had lived uninterruptedly for forty years in Moscow. She had neither much intelligence, nor great wealth, and she did not think much of connections,--on the contrary; and there was not a man who did not respect her. She was so convinced that everybody ought to respect her that everybody actually respected her. There were some young liberals from the university who did not recognize her power, but these gentlemen made a bold front only in her absence. She needed only to enter the drawing-room with her royal gait, to say something in her calm manner, to smile her kindly smile, and they were vanquished. Her society consisted of everybody. She looked upon all of Moscow as her home folk, and treated them as such. She had friends mostly among the young people and clever men, but women she did not like. She had also dependents, whom our literature has for some reason included with the Hungarian woman and with generals in one common class for contempt; but Márya Ivánovna considered it better for Skópin, who had been ruined in cards, and Madame Byéshev, whom her husband had driven away, to be living with her than in misery, and so she kept them. But the two great passions in Márya Ivánovna's present life were her two brothers. Peter Ivánovich was her idol. Prince Iván was hateful to her. She had not known that Peter Ivánovich had arrived; she had attended mass, and was just finishing her coffee.