Chapter 37 Section VI

That afternoon, Puning couldn't wait to go into the kitchen and start cooking.Just after five o'clock he set to work, pausing only briefly, to change into his reception attire, a sumptuous blue silk smoking suit with a fringed belt and satin lapels, which was still twenty years old. Prize won at a charity meeting of exiles in Paris years ago - how time flies!The pair of old tuxedo trousers that went with the coat were also European.He set his wide tortoiseshell reading glasses over his bulging, Russian potato, slippery nose, and looked at the cracked mirror of the medicine cabinet.He bared his dentures.He checked his face and chin to see if the morning shave was all right.good.He used his thumb and forefinger to pull a long nose hair, and pulled it out a second time, so "Ah-choo" sneezed, and the sound was like an explosion.

At seven-thirty, Betty came to help him with the final arrangement.Betty now teaches English and History at Asura Middle School.She hadn't changed much, and she was still the same as the strong graduate.The myopic gray eyes behind the pink spectacles still stare at you frankly and pitifully.She still combed Gan Leiqing's hairstyle, with her thick hair coiled on her head.The scar on the soft neck is still there.But a small diamond engagement ring appeared on the fat hand, and she showed it to Pnin with coy pride, and he, for his part, felt a secret pang of sorrow.He remembered that for a while he could have courted her--if she hadn't got the idea of ​​a nurse in her head, which she still had, he would have wooed her.She can now tell quite a long story in a "she said-I said-she said" way.There's nothing you can do to tell her not to believe all the learning and wit that her favorite women's magazines preach.She still does that queer little trick--and there are two or three petty young women in Pnin's little circle of society too--that is, when you remind her of an insignificant thing, she pat your sleeve hesitantly in acknowledgment or rather in retaliation: you'll say, "Betty, you forgot to return that book" or "Betty, I thought you said I won't marry forever", before she can give a specific answer, she will make that prudish gesture, and at the same time retract her chubby fingers that touch your wrist.

"He's a biochemist working in Pittsburgh right now," Betty said, helping Pnin arrange buttered slices of French bread around a jar of fresh, slippery gray caviar, and clean three large clusters of grapes.There was also a large platter, real German barley semolina, a plate of cold shrimp with special sauce, sauerkraut and green beans, sausages in tomato sauce, hot pirozhki (mushroom pie, meat stuffing) cakes, cabbage pies), plus four kinds of dried fruit and all kinds of delicious oriental sweets.Drinks included whiskey (a gift from Betty), ryabinovka (a prickly ash berry wine), brandy and pomegranate juice and, of course, Pnin's five flavors, a chilled French wine, grapefruit juice and kirsch. Intoxicating spirits, which the no-nonsense host had already stirred in a large glass bowl of sea-blue dazzling, swirled and lily-shaded.

"Oh, what a beautiful bowl!" cried Betty. Pnin glanced at the bowl with satisfied wonder, as if seeing it for the first time.He said it was a gift from Victor.By the way, how is he now?Did he like St. Bartos' school?He thought it was ok.He spent the first summer with his mother in California and then worked two months in a Yosemite restaurant.What's going on with the family?It's a restaurant in the mountains of California.Well, he went back to school later and this gift came out of the blue. The day the bowl arrived, not to mention what a coincidence, happened to be the day Puning counted the chairs and prepared to hold a big banquet.It came in a big box with another box inside and a third box, and it was so stuffed with paper and sawdust that it opened up everywhere in the kitchen. Yes, it's like having a carnival sprinkle.The first impression of the emergent bowl in the recipient's mind is a colorful image, a vaguely beautiful object that reflects the giver's endearing character with such symbolic power that it is virtually Character seems rather to be melted in the pure inner fire, and suddenly leaps once and for all into brilliant reality at the admiration of an outsider who does not understand its true value.