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 CHAPTER XI

they entered the studio, Mikhaïlof again glanced at his guests, and stored away in his memory the expression of Vronsky's face, especially its cheek-bones. Notwithstanding the fact that this man's artistic sense was always at work storing up new materials, notwithstanding the fact that his emotion grew greater and greater as the crucial moment for their criticism of his work approached, still he quickly and shrewdly gathered from almost imperceptible indications his conclusions regarding his three visitors.

"That one [meaning Golenishchef] must be a Russian resident in Italy." Mikhailof did not remember either his name or the place where he had met him, or whether he had ever spoken to him; he remembered only his face, as he remembered all the faces that he had ever seen, but he also remembered that he had once before classed him in the immense category of pretentiously important but really expressionless faces. An abundance of hair and a very high forehead would make the casual observer take him to be a man of importance, but his face had an insignificant expression of puerile agitation concentrated in the narrow space between his eyes.

Vronsky and Anna were, according to Mikhaïlof's intuition, rich and distinguished Russians, ignorant of art, like all rich Russians who play the amateur and the connoisseur.

"They have undoubtedly seen all the old galleries," he thought, "and now are visiting the studios of the German charlatans and the imbecile English pre-Raphaelites, and have come to me in order to complete their survey."

He knew very well the fashion in which the dilettanti—the more intellectual they were, the worse they were—visited the studios of modern painters, with the single aim of having the right to say that art was declining, and that, the more you study the moderns, the better you see how inimitable the great masters of old were.