human
If you guess who is writing to you, and if it does not bore you, come to-morrow, after dinner, to the Tver boulevard--about five o'clock--and wait. You will not be detained long. But it is very important. Come.
gpt
What nonsense! he said, almost aloud.
human
This is too much! Of course I shall not go. --Nevertheless, he ordered the messenger to be summoned, and from him he learned merely that the letter had been handed to him on the street by a maid. Having dismissed him, Arátoff reread the letter, and flung it on the floor.... But after a while he picked it up and read it over again; a second time he cried:
gpt
Nonsense!
human
had not in the least grasped the meaning of the letter. But there was that jester Kupfer shouting:
gpt
A Rachel! A Viardot! Then he went to his piano, raised the cover in an abstracted sort of way, tried to search out in his memory the melody of Tchaikóvsky's romance; but he immediately banged to the piano-lid with vexation and went to his aunt, in her own room, which was always kept very hot, and was forever redolent of mint, sage, and other medicinal herbs, and crowded with such a multitude of rugs, étagères, little benches, cushions and various articles of softly-stuffed furniture that it was difficult for an inexperienced person to turn round in it, and breathing was oppressive. Platonída Ivánovna was sitting by the window with her knitting-needles in her hand (she was knitting a scarf for Yáshenka--the thirty-eighth, by actual count, during the course of his existence!)--and was greatly surprised. Arátoff rarely entered her room, and if he needed anything he always shouted in a shrill voice from his study:
human
Aunt Platósha!