“To do your hair up?” “Yes, yes, please. I beg your pardon,” Maria Nikolaevna repeated with the same smile. She nodded to Sanin, and turning swiftly, vanished through the doorway, leaving behind her a fleeting but graceful impression of a charming neck, exquisite shoulders, an exquisite figure. Polozov got up, and rolling ponderously, went out by the same door. Sanin did not doubt for a single second that his presence in “Prince Polozov’s” drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its mistress; the whole point of her entry had been the display of her hair, which was certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted indeed at this freak on the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she is anxious to impress me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be accommodating about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of Gemma that all other women had absolutely no significance for him; he hardly noticed them; and this time he went no further than thinking, “Yes, it was the truth they told me; that lady’s really magnificent to look at!” But had he not been in such an exceptional state of mind he would most likely have expressed himself differently; Maria Nikolaevna Polozov, by birth Kolishkin, was a very striking personality. And not that she was of a beauty to which no exception could be taken; traces of her plebeian origin were rather clearly apparent in her. Her forehead was low, her nose rather fleshy and turned up; she could boast neither of the delicacy of her skin nor of the elegance of her hands and feet—but what did all that matter? Any one meeting her would not, to use Pushkin’s words, have stood still before “the holy shrine of beauty,” but before the sorcery of a half-Russian, half-Gipsy woman’s body in its full flower and full power … and he would have been nothing loath to stand still! But Gemma’s image preserved Sanin like the three-fold armour of which the poets sing. Ten minutes later Maria Nikolaevna appeared again, escorted by her husband. She went up to Sanin … and her walk was such that some eccentrics of that—alas!—already, distant day, were simply crazy over her walk alone. “That woman, when she comes towards one, seems as though she is bringing all the happiness of one’s life to meet one,” one of them used to say. She went up to Sanin, and holding out her hand to him, said in her caressing and, as it were, subdued voice in Russian, “You will wait for me, won’t you? I’ll be back soon.” Sanin bowed respectfully, while Maria Nikolaevna vanished behind the curtain over the outside door; and as she vanished turned her head back over her shoulder, and smiled again, and again left behind her the same impression of grace. When she smiled, not one and not two, but three dimples came out on each cheek, and her eyes smiled more than her lips—long, crimson, juicy lips with two tiny moles on the left side of them.