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RUDIN ‘What do you want with cornflowers?—to make a wreath?’ replied the girl; ‘come now, go along then, I declare.’

‘Stop a minute, my pretty little dear,’ Konstantin Diomiditch was beginning.

‘There now, go along,’ the girl interrupted him, ‘there are the young gentlemen coming.’

Konstantin Diomiditch looked round. There really were Vanya and Petya, Darya Mihailovna’s sons, running along the road; after them walked their tutor, Bassistoff, a young man of two-and-twenty, who had only just left college. Bassistoff was a well-grown youth, with a simple face, a large nose, thick lips, and small grey eyes, plain and awkward, but kind, good, and upright. He dressed untidily and wore his hair long—not from affectation, but from laziness; he liked eating and he liked sleeping, but he also liked a good book, and an earnest conversation, and he hated Pandalevsky from the depths of his soul.

Darya Mihailovna’s children worshipped Bassistoff, and yet were not in the least afraid of him; he was on a friendly footing with all the rest of the household, a fact which was not 17