"Never should I have believed that you would have remembered us!" The two friends exchanged hearty embraces, and Manilov then conducted his guest to the drawing-room.

During the brief time that they are traversing the hall, the anteroom, and the dining-room, let me try to say something concerning the master of the house.

But such an undertaking bristles with difficulties--it promises to be a far less easy task than the depicting of some outstanding personality which calls but for a wholesale dashing of colours upon the canvas--the colours of a pair of dark, burning eyes, a pair of dark, beetling brows, a forehead seamed with wrinkles, a black, or a fiery-red, cloak thrown backwards over the shoulder, and so forth, and so forth.

Yet, so numerous are Russian serf owners that, though careful scrutiny reveals to one's sight a quantity of outre peculiarities, they are, as a class, exceedingly difficult to portray, and one needs to strain one's faculties to the utmost before it becomes possible to pick out their variously subtle, their almost invisible, features.

In short, one needs, before doing this, to carry out a prolonged probing with the aid of an insight sharpened in the acute school of research.
Only God can say what Manilov's real character was.