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RUDIN her looking so calm. Her passions are strong, and her character—my goodness!’

‘Come! I think you are indulging in a flight of fancy now. To a phlegmatic person like you, I suppose even I seem a volcano?’

‘Oh, no!’ answered Lezhnyov, with a smile. ‘And as for character—you have no character at all, thank God!’

‘What impertinence is that?’

‘That? It’s the highest compliment, believe me.’

Volintsev came in and looked suspiciously at Lezhnyov and his sister. He had grown thin of late. They both began to talk to him, but he scarcely smiled in response to their jests, and looked, as Pigasov once said of him, like a melancholy hare. But there has certainly never been a man in the world who, at some time in his life, has not looked worse than that. Volintsev felt that Natalya was drifting away from him, and with her it seemed as if the earth was giving way under his feet. 130