The dinner, the dining room, the dinnerware, the servants, the wine and the food were not only in keeping with the general tone of new luxury in the house, but seemed even newer and more luxurious than all the rest. Darya Alexandrovna observed this luxury, which was new to her, and, being herself the mistress of a house - though with no hope of applying to her own house anything of what she saw, so far did its luxury exceed her style of life - involuntarily took note of all the details, asking herself who had done it all and how. Vasenka Veslovsky, her own husband, and even Sviyazhsky, and many other people she knew, never gave it a thought, and took for granted what any decent host wishes his guests to feel - namely, that everything he had arranged so well had cost him, the host, no trouble and had got done by itself. But Darya Alexandrovna knew that not even the porridge for the children’s breakfast got done by itself and that therefore such a complicated and excellent arrangement had required someone’s close attention. And from the look of Alexei Kirillovich as he inspected the table, nodded to the butler, and offered her a choice between cold borscht and soup, she understood that everything was done and maintained through the care of the host himself. It obviously depended no more on Anna than on Veslovsky. She, Sviyazhsky, the princess and Veslovsky were guests alike, cheerfully enjoying what had been prepared for them.
Anna was hostess only in conducting the conversation. And that task - quite difficult for a hostess at a small table in the presence of people like the steward and the architect, people from a completely different world, trying not to be intimidated by the unaccustomed luxury and unable to take part for long in a general conversation - Anna performed with her usual tact, naturalness and even pleasure, as Darya Alexandrovna noticed.
The conversation turned to how Tushkevich and Veslovsky had gone for a boat ride alone, and Tushkevich began telling them about the last race at the Petersburg Yacht Club. But Anna, after a suitable pause, turned at once to the architect, to draw him out of his silence.
‘Nikolai Ivanovich was struck,’ she said of Sviyazhsky, ‘by how the new building has grown since he was here last; but I’m there every day, and every day I’m surprised at how quickly it goes.’
‘It’s good working with his excellency,’ the architect said with a smile (he was a quiet and deferential man with a sense of his own dignity). ‘A far cry from dealing with the provincial authorities. Where we’d fill out a stack of papers with them, I just report to the count, we discuss it, and in three words it’s done.’
‘American methods,’ Sviyazhsky said, smiling.
‘Yes, sir, building’s done rationally there ...’
The conversation turned to government abuses in the United States, but Anna immediately turned it to a different subject, so as to draw the steward out of his silence.
‘Have you ever seen these harvesting machines?’ She turned to Darya Alexandrovna. ‘We were coming from looking at them when we met you. It was the first time I’d seen them myself.’
‘How do they work?’ asked Dolly.
‘Just like scissors. A board and a lot of little scissors. Like this.’
Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful, white, ring-adorned hands and began to demonstrate. She obviously could see that her explanation would not make anything understood, but, knowing that her speech was pleasant and her hands were beautiful, she went on explaining.
‘Rather like penknives,’ Veslovsky said playfully, never taking his eyes off her.
Anna gave a barely noticeable smile, but did not reply to him.
‘Isn’t it just like scissors, Karl Fedorych?’ She turned to the steward.
‘Too bad it doesn’t bind. I saw one at an exhibition in Vienna that binds with wire,’ said Sviyazhsky. ‘They’d be more profitable.’
‘And we hoped to find you in the fields, Vassily Semyonych,’ she turned to the doctor, a sickly man. ‘Were you there?’
