Chapter 21

PRINCE IVAN IVANOVITCH

"Now for the last call--the visit to Nikitskaia Street," I said
to Kuzma, and we started for Prince Ivan Ivanovitch's mansion.

Towards the end, a round of calls usually brings one a certain
amount of self-assurance: consequently I was approaching the
Prince's abode in quite a tranquil frame of mind, when suddenly I
remembered the Princess Kornakoff's words that I was his heir,
and at the same moment caught sight of two carriages waiting at
the portico. Instantly, my former nervousness returned.

Both the old major-domo who opened the door to me, and the
footman who took my coat, and the two male and three female
visitors whom I found in the drawing-room, and, most of all,
Prince Ivan Ivanovitch himself (whom I found clad in a "company"
frockcoat and seated on a sofa) seemed to look at me as at an
HEIR, and so to eye me with ill-will. Yet the Prince was very
gracious and, after kissing me (that is to say, after pressing
his cold, dry, flabby lips to my cheek for a second), asked me
about my plans and pursuits, jested with me, inquired whether I
still wrote verses of the kind which I used to indite in honour
of my grandmother's birthdays, and invited me to dine with him
that day. Nevertheless, in proportion as he grew the kinder, the
more did I feel persuaded that his civility was only intended to
conceal from me the fact that he disliked the idea of my being
his heir. He had a custom (due to his false teeth, of which his
mouth possessed a complete set) of raising his upper lip a little
as he spoke, and producing a slight whistling sound from it; and
whenever, on the present occasion, he did so it seemed to me that
he was saying to himself: "A boy, a boy--I know it! And my heir,
too--my heir!"

When we were children, we had been used to calling the Prince
"dear Uncle;" but now, in my capacity of heir, I could not bring
my tongue to the phrase, while to say "Your Highness," as did one
of the other visitors, seemed derogatory to my self-esteem.
Consequently, never once during that visit did I call him anything
at all. The personage, however, who most disturbed me was the old
Princess who shared with me the position of prospective
inheritor, and who lived in the Prince's house. While seated
beside her at dinner, I felt firmly persuaded that the reason why
she would not speak to me was that she disliked me for being her
co-heir, and that the Prince, for his part, paid no attention to
our side of the table for the reason that the Princess and myself
hoped to succeed him, and so were alike distasteful in his sight.

"You cannot think how I hated it all!" I said to Dimitrieff the
same evening, in a