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What fine-sounding phrases all about love that didn’t come off, to use Gogol’s expression! … I come back to my story. In the course of that day I assured myself again that I was the most blissful of mortals. I drove out of the town to Ivan Semyonitch’s. He received me very gleefully; he had been meaning to go and see a neighbour, but I myself stopped him. I was afraid to be left alone with Varia. The evening was cheerful, but not reassuring. Varia was neither one thing nor the other, neither cordial nor melancholy … neither pretty nor plain. I looked at her, as the philosophers say, objectively–that is to say, as the man who has dined looks at the dishes. I thought her hands were rather red. Sometimes, however, my heart warmed, and watching her I gave way to other dreams and reveries. I had only just made her an offer, as it is called, and here I was already feeling as though we were living as husband and wife … as though our souls already made up one lovely whole, belonged to one another, and consequently were trying each to seek out a separate path for itself….

‘Well, have you spoken to papa?’ Varia said to me, as soon as we were left alone.

This inquiry impressed me most disagreeably…. I thought to myself, ‘You’re pleased to be in a desperate hurry, Varvara Ivanovna.’

‘Not yet,’ I answered, rather shortly, ‘but I will speak to him.’

Altogether I behaved rather casually with her. In spite of my promise, I said nothing definite to Ivan Semyonitch. As I was leaving, I pressed his hand significantly, and informed him that I wanted to have a little talk with him … that was all…. ‘Good-bye!’ I said to Varia.

‘Till we meet!’ said she.

I will not keep you long in suspense, gentlemen; I am afraid of exhausting your patience….We never met again. I never went back to Ivan Semyonitch’s. The first days, it is true, of my voluntary separation from Varia did not pass without tears, self-reproach, and emotion; I was frightened myself at the rapid drooping of my love; twenty times over I was on the point of starting off to see her. Vividly I pictured to myself her amazement, her grief, her wounded feelings; but–I never went to Ivan Semyonitch’s again. In her absence I begged her forgiveness, fell on my knees before her, assured her of my profound repentance–and once, when I met a girl in the street slightly resembling her, I took to my heels without looking back, and only breathed freely in a cook-shop after the fifth jam-puff. The word ‘to-morrow’ was invented for irresolute people, and for children; like a baby, I lulled myself with that magic word. ‘To-morrow I will go to her, whatever happens,’ I said to myself, and ate and slept well to-day. I began to think a great deal more about Kolosov than about Varia … everywhere, continually, I saw his open, bold, careless face. I began going to see him as before. He gave me the same welcome as ever. But how deeply I felt his superiority to me! How ridiculous I thought all my fancies, my pensive melancholy, during the period of Kolosov’s connection with Varia, my magnanimous resolution to bring them together again, my anticipations, my raptures, my remorse!… I had played a wretched, drawn-out part of screaming farce, but he had passed so simply, so well, through it all….

You will say, ‘What is there wonderful in that? your Kolosov fell in love with a girl, then fell out of love again, and threw her over…. Why, that happens with everybody….’ Agreed; but which of us knows just when to break with our past? Which of us, tell me, is not afraid of the reproaches–I don’t mean of the woman–the reproaches of every chance fool? Which of us is proof against the temptation of making a display of magnanimity, or of playing egoistically with another devoted heart? Which of us, in fact, has the force of character to be superior to petty vanity, to petty fine feelings, sympathy and self-reproach?… Oh, gentlemen, the man who leaves a woman at that great and bitter moment when he is forced to recognise that his heart is not altogether, not fully, hers, that man, believe me, has a truer and deeper comprehension of the sacredness of love than the faint-hearted creatures who, from dulness or weakness, go on playing on the half-cracked strings of their flabby and sentimental hearts! At the beginning of my story I told you that we all considered Andrei Kolosov an extraordinary man. And if a clear, simple outlook upon life, if the absence of every kind of cant in a young man, can be called an extraordinary thing, Kolosov deserved the name. At a certain age, to be natural is to be extraordinary…. It is time to finish, though. I thank you for your attention…. Oh, I forgot to tell you that three months after my last visit I met the old humbug Ivan Semyonitch. I tried, of course, to glide hurriedly and unnoticed by him, but yet I could not help overhearing the words, ‘Feather-headed scoundrels!’ uttered angrily.

‘And what became of Varia?’ asked some one.

‘I don’t know,’ answered the story-teller.

We all got up and separated.

1864.