body, a character straight out of an Ostrovsky comedy ; and secondly, a daughter much older than Clara and not like her — a very clever girl, and enthusiastic, only sickly, a remarkable girl — and very advanced in her ideas, my dear boy! That they were living, the widow and daughter, fairly comfortably, in a decent little house, obtained by the sale of the bad portraits and holy pictures; that Clara . . . or Katia, if you like, from her childhood up impressed every one with her talent, but was of an insubordinate, capricious temper, and used to be for ever quarrelling with her father; that having an inborn passion for the theatre, at sixteen she had run away from her parent's house with an actress . . .'
'With an actor?' put in Aratov.
'No, not with an actor, with an actress, to whom she became attached. . . . It's true this actress had a protector, a wealthy gentleman, no longer young, who did not marry her simply because he happened to be married — and indeed I fancy the actress was a married woman.' Furthermore Kupfer informed Aratov that Clara had even before her coming to Moscow acted and sung in provincial theatres, that, having lost her friend the actress — the gentleman, too, it seemed, had died, or else he had made it up with his wife — Kupfer could
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