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RUDIN at once repay you my debt, but directly I reach my place’

‘Nonsense, Dmitri Nikolaitch!’ Darya Mihailovna cut him short. ‘I wonder you’re not ashamed to speak of it! What o’clock is it?’ she asked.

Pandalevsky drew a gold and enamel watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and looked at it carefully, bending his rosy cheek over his stiff, white collar.

‘Thirty-three minutes past two,’ he announced.

‘It is time to dress,’ observed Darya Mihailovna. ‘Good-bye for the present, Dmitri Nikolaitch!’

Rudin got up. The whole conversation between him and Darya Mihailovna had a special character. In the same way actors repeat their parts, and diplomatic dignitaries interchange their carefully-worded phrases.

Rudin went away. He knew by now through experience that men and women of the world do not even break with a man who is of no further use to them, but simply let him drop, like a kid glove after a ball, like the paper 193