Laurence’s amazement knew no bounds when she heard the bursts of laughter that followed at her end of the table--echoed _pianissimo_ by those below the salt. All this was hardly decent, she thought, for she had a singular fund of prudishness concealed far down below many other more agreeable defects. This old woman, with her angular shoulders, her corded neck and parchmented skin, seemed to her own youth positively odious as she sat enthroned there, flying her arms and bewailing her lost opportunities. She wondered at Basil, who seemed quite touched, and patted almost filially one of the flat wrists, crowded to the elbow with _porte-bonheurs_, that reposed for a fleeting second on the cloth beside him. To Laurence the deeps of those wonderful sapphire eyes that had been always the Countess’s sole but very potent beauty, and were still so infinitely expressive and youthful, said nothing at all, although they were just now not quite free from a certain telltale moisture. “An old absurdity,” she called the great lady in her own mind, and, like the Nesselrode tray of the defunct Count, she froze up through and through, becoming with every new experience more hostile to the foreign atmosphere surrounding her. The farther she penetrated into the heart of Russia the less she comprehended or liked her new country. Indeed, slowly but surely a sort of abhorrence for everything pertaining to it was rising within her; and her hard face and unsympathetic expression made one young officer on leave murmur to another young officer on leave, who sat beside him at table that night: “I say, Voïnóff, Palitzin’s efforts to marry a foreigner are all in vain. He’s caught a Tartar, after all!” The other, whose uniform glittered like sunshine, and whose name was the vernacular for “Warrior,” was blessed with one of those meek faces that are greatly confirmed in that expression by sleek, butter-hued hair rigidly parted all the way down the middle, as was his. Also he had a habit of blushing all over his scalp, which made him resemble for minutes at a time what the Italians frivolously call _un piccolo porcellino_. He indulged in one of these manifestations at his comrade’s words, adding thereto a smothered squeal of delight, which completed the likeness very neatly. “I catch you laughing at me, Yégor-Alexandréitch!” Countess Chouróff called out to him. “You think my little stories are not befitting this noble assemblage!” “It ... it is Zakbarièf!” choked the youth, getting pinker and pinker under his pale, silky thatch. “He is so funny!” Zakbarièf tried to protest, but vainly, for Madame Chouróff had already launched herself into another anecdote, and he relapsed into silence, bestowing dagger-like looks upon his grinning brother-at-arms.