decent, long-skirted coat. He stopped in the doorway, and bowed—only with his head.
"So your name's Baburin?" queried my grandmother, and she added to herself: ' Il a l'air d'un arménien.'
'Yes, it is,' the man answered in a deep and even voice. At the first brusque sound of my grandmother's voice his eyebrows faintly quivered. Surely he had not expected her to address him as an equal?
'Are you a Russian? orthodox?'
'Yes.'
My grandmother took off her spectacles, and scanned Baburin from head to foot deliberately. He did not drop his eyes, he merely folded his hands behind his back. What particularly struck my fancy was his beard; it was very smoothly shaven, but such blue cheeks and chin I had never seen in my life!
'Yakov Petrovitch,' began my grandmother, 'recommends you strongly in his letter as sober and industrious; why, then, did you leave his service?'
'He needs a different sort of person to manage his estate, madam.'
'A different . . . sort? That I don't quite understand.'
My grandmother rattled her beads again. 'Yakov Petrovitch writes to me that there are two peculiarities about you. What peculiarities?'
79
