'Ah, you feel, it seems, a special attraction towards everything Italian. It's strange you didn't find your lady-love there. Are you fond of art? of pictures? or more of music?'
'I am fond of art. . . . I like everything beautiful.'
'And music?'
'I like music too.'
'Well, I don't at all. I don't care for anything but Russian songs—and that in the country and in the spring—with dancing, you know . . . red shirts, wreaths of beads, the young grass in the meadows, the smell of smoke . . . delicious! But we weren't talking of me. Go on, tell me.'
Maria Nikolaevna walked on, and kept looking at Sanin. She was tall—her face was almost on a level with his face.
He began to talk—at first reluctantly, unskilfully—but afterwards he talked more freely, chattered away in fact. Maria Nikolaevna was a very good listener; and moreover she seemed herself so frank, that she led others unconsciously on to frankness. She possessed that great gift of 'intimateness'—le terrible don de la familiarité—to which Cardinal Retz refers. Sanin talked of his travels, of his life in Petersburg, of his youth.. . . Had Maria Nikolaevna been a lady of fashion, with refined
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