Gzhatski observed her in amazed silence, and smilingly watched the transformation of yesterday’s nun, with her flat hair and her eternal black dress, into a coloured fashion-plate. Being, in his heart, far more pleased than otherwise that his future wife should be well dressed and elegant, he did not protest. What disquieted him much more, indeed, was a passion that Irene suddenly developed for gambling. Gzhatski, having himself once advised her to cultivate some passion, if only artificially, just that it might attach her more firmly to earth, very ruefully contemplated the development of this passion now that it had shown itself without any effort on Irene’s part! Sergei Grigorievitch, indeed, was one of those men who, in the woman they have chosen, admit only one possible passion: that of love for themselves! It was anything but easy to dissuade Irene from gambling. She revelled in the sensations of those feverish minutes passed at the tables, falling into the depths of despair at the loss of fifty francs, and soaring into an absolute frenzy of delight at the gain of forty! On leaving the gambling rooms, Irene took deep breaths of the fresh sea air, her eyes shone, and it seemed to her that the sea and the hills and the flowers had never been so beautiful before. It was this that displeased Gzhatski. He might have reconciled himself to the idea of her gambling had she regretted her losses, but he could not forgive her that feverish delight, that moral ecstacy and satisfaction that she gleaned from this new craze. Sometimes he succeeded in luring her away from the temptations of the tables by arranging excursions in the neighbourhood. Like most Slavs, indeed like most sons of a young race, Gzhatski could not grow old, and at forty, he often laughed and played pranks like a schoolboy. He had the capacity, indeed, of infecting everyone around him with his gaiety, even cab-drivers, boatmen, and waiters! To each and all of them he knew how to say the right word, or make the right joke, at the right moment. He was descended indeed from a noble old race of landowners, who had always been ready to till their own soil, side by side with their peasants, seeing in the latter, not machines, but interesting and deserving human beings. To Irene, such simple relations with the lower classes seemed strangely new and original. In the usual Petrograd fashion, she had hardly ever exchanged a word with her servants, and barely knew them by sight. At hotels at which she had stayed for two months she had nearly always, on leaving, been obliged, before giving a tip, to ask the manager which waiter had served her all the time, she herself being quite unable to distinguish him from the others.