ishing
the figure when the cards were brought him.

"Coming, coming!"

He went in to his wife.

"Come, Sasha, don't be cross!" he said, smiling timidly and
affectionately at her. "You were to blame. I was to blame.
I'll make it all right." And having made peace with his wife he
put on an olive-green overcoat with a velvet collar and a hat,
and went towards his studio. The successful figure he had
already forgotten. Now he was delighted and excited at the visit
of these people of consequence, Russians, who had come in their
carriage.

Of his picture, the one that stood now on his easel, he had at
the bottom of his heart one conviction--that no one had ever
painted a picture like it. He did not believe that his picture
was better than all the pictures of Raphael, but he knew that
what he tried to convey in that picture, no one ever had
conveyed. This he knew positively, and had known a long while,
ever since he had begun to paint it. But other people's
criticisms, whatever they might be, had yet immense consequence
in his eyes, and they agitated him to the depths of his soul.
Any remark, the most insignificant, that showed that the critic
saw even the tiniest part of what he saw in the picture, agitated
him to the depths of his soul. He always attributed to his
critics a more profound comprehension than he had himself, and
always expected from them something he did not himself see in the
picture. And often in their criticisms he fancied that he had
found this.

He walked rapidly to the door of his studio, and in spite of his
excitement he was struck by the soft light on Anna's figure as
she stood in the shade of the entrance listening to
Golenishtchev, who was eagerly telling her something, while she
evidently wanted to look round at the artist. He was himself
unconscious how, as he approached them, he seized on this
impression and absorbed it, as he had the chin of the shopkeeper
who had sold him the cigars, and put it away somewhere to be
brought out when he wanted it. The visitors, not agreeably
impressed beforehand by Golenishtchev's account of the artist,
were still less so by his personal appearance. Thick-set and of
middle height, with nimble movements, with his brown hat,
olive-green coat and narrow trousers--though wide trousers had
been a long while in fashion,--most of all, with the ordinariness
of his broad face, and the combined expression of timidity and
anxiety to keep up his dignity