Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/270

258 the other accomplished officers in fashionable novels, when, chancing to raise his eyes, he stood rooted to the spot.

It was not the governor's wife alone who stood before him; on her arm was a fresh-looking fair-haired girl of sixteen, with delicate and graceful features, a pointed chin, and a face of an enchantingly rounded oval, such as an artist might have taken as a model for his Madonna, and such as is rarely seen in Russia, where everything, whatever it may be, is apt to be on a broad scale: mountains, forests, steppes, faces, lips, and feet. It was the same fair-haired girl whom he had met on his way back from Nozdryov's when through the stupidity of the coachman or the horses, their carriages had come so strangely into collision, when their harness was entangled and Uncle Mitya and Uncle Minyay undertook to extricate them.

Tchitchikov was so overcome that he could utter nothing coherent, and goodness knows what he mumbled, something that certainly no Gremin, Zvonsky or Lidin would have said.

'You don't know my daughter?' said the governor's wife, 'she has only just left school.'

He said that he had already by chance had the happiness of making her acquaintance; he tried to say something more, but the something more did not come off. The governor's wife said two or three words, and then went off with her daughter to the other end of the drawing-room to talk to other guests; while Tchitchikov still