carelessness, that ‘deuce-take-it’ air, which comes out so naturally during foreign travel. The party seated themselves with much noise and ostentation, and called the obsequious waiters. Litvinov made haste to drink off his glass of milk, paid for it, and putting his hat on, was just making off past the party of generals.... ‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ he heard a woman’s voice. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ He stopped involuntarily. That voice ... that voice had too often set his heart beating in the past.... He turned round and saw Irina. She was sitting at a table, her arms folded on the back of a chair drawn up near; with her head bent on one side and a smile on her face, she was looking at him cordially, almost with delight. Litvinov knew her at once, though she had changed since he saw her that last time ten years ago, though she had been transformed from a girl into a woman. Her slim figure had developed and reached its perfection, the lines of her once narrow shoulders now recalled the goddesses that stand out on the ceilings of ancient Italian palaces. But her eyes remained the same, and it seemed to Litvinov that they were looking at him just as in those days in the little house in Moscow. ‘Irina Pavlovna,’ he uttered irresolutely. ‘You know me? How glad I am! how glad----’ She stopped short, slightly blushing, and drew herself up. ‘This is a very pleasant meeting,’ she continued now in French. ‘Let me introduce you to my husband. _Valérien, Monsieur Litvinov, un ami d’enfance_; Valerian Vladimirovitch Ratmirov, my husband.’ One of the young generals, almost the most elegant of all, got up from his seat, and with excessive courtesy bowed to Litvinov, while the rest of his companions faintly knitted their brows, or rather each of them withdrew for an instant into himself, as though protesting betimes against any contact with an extraneous civilian, and the other ladies taking part in the picnic thought fit to screw up their eyes a little and simper, and even to assume an air of perplexity. ‘Have you--er--been long in Baden?’ asked General Ratmirov, with a dandified air utterly un-Russian. He obviously did not know what to talk about with the friend of his wife’s childhood. ‘No, not long!’ replied Litvinov. ‘And do you intend to stay long?’ pursued the polite general. ‘I have not made up my mind yet.’ ‘Ah! that is very delightful ... very.’ The general paused. Litvinov, too, was speechless. Both held their hats in their hands and bending forward with a grin, gazed at the top of each other’s heads. ‘_Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche_,’ began humming--out of tune of course, we have never come across a Russian nobleman who did not sing out of tune--a dull-eyed and yellow-faced general, with an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for his own appearance. Among all his companions he alone had not the complexion of a rose.