The woman on the verandah is the grandmother, Antonida Vassilievna, seventy-five, carried up in an armchair, bolt-upright, the same woman the telegrams had been asking after as if she were already dead. She saw Alexei a hundred paces off and called his name. He stands with his eyes starting. She tells him they buried her after hosts of telegrams, and that she is very much alive. She got into the chair and came. Potapitch is to reserve her a suite, not too high. She likes the Englishman who stared and never opened his lips. Alexei thinks she knows the telegrams and De Griers, and little or nothing of Blanche. He does not tell her. Then he finds he is glad of the shock, and he throws the study door open without knocking.
They are planning an outing. Blanche is in a riding-habit, whip in hand. The chair is set down three paces from the General. He stops in the middle of a word, jaw dropped. She looks back with challenge, triumph, and ridicule. For ten seconds nobody speaks. Only Polina is not surprised, and then she goes white, and then red to her temples. Here I am, the grandmother says, and instead of a telegram. The General's greeting dies in his mouth. She knows what the telegrams cost. De Griers welcomes her in French. She calls him a mountebank, and trusts him no more than her little finger. She asks if Blanche is married. She is not. How the woman sticks out her eyes and minces. I have taken the rooms next door. Are you glad? When he speaks of dismay at her illness, she says, Fibs, fibs.
An apothecary from Nicolai got her out of bed with hayseed, and the German doctors sent her to the waters, so she came. She asks where the money for these rooms came from, since everything is mortgaged and the Frenchman is the creditor. The General says his expenses do not exceed his income. She says he is robbing the children, whose guardian he is, and whistling the property away at roulette. He says that he does not play. Rubbish. This very day she means to go and see what roulette is like, and she asks whether a chair can be carried up the Shlangenberg. De Griers whispers that she has fallen into her second childhood. She tells the General he will have none of her money, and says, Lift me. The chair goes down the stairs. He walks as though he had been struck with a cudgel. The money has already been refused. The roulette she means to see is still ahead.
