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She had been imploring…. Her face suddenly flushed, and as suddenly assumed an evil and audacious expression,–“O Lord! how stupid this is!”–she cried suddenly, with a harsh laugh.–“How stupid our tryst is! How stupid I am! … and you, too!… Fie!”

She made a disdainful gesture with her hand as though sweeping him out of her path, and passing around him she ran swiftly from the boulevard and disappeared.

That gesture of the hand, that insulting laugh, that final exclamation instantly restored Aratoff to his former frame of mind and stifled in him the feeling which had risen in his soul when she turned to him with tears in her eyes. Again he waxed wroth, and came near shouting after the retreating girl: “You may turn out a good actress, but why have you taken it into your head to play a comedy on me?”

With great strides he returned home, and although he continued to be indignant and to rage all the way thither, still, at the same time, athwart all these evil, hostile feelings there forced its way the memory of that wondrous face which he had beheld only for the twinkling of an eye…. He even put to himself the question: “Why did not I answer her when she demanded from me at least one word?”–“I did not have time,” … he thought…. “She did not give me a chance to utter that word…. And what would I have uttered?”

But he immediately shook his head and said, “An actress!”

And yet, at the same time, the vanity of the inexperienced, nervous youth, which had been wounded at first, now felt rather flattered at the passion which he had inspired….

“But on the other hand,” he pursued his reflections, “all that is at an end of course…. I must have appeared ridiculous to her.”….

This thought was disagreeable to him, and again he grew angry … both at her … and at himself. On reaching home he locked himself in his study. He did not wish to encounter Platosha. The kind old woman came to his door a couple of times, applied her ear to the key-hole, and merely sighed and whispered her prayer….

“It has begun!” she thought…. “And he is only five-and-twenty…. Akh, it is early, early!”

VIII

Akatoff was very much out of sorts all the following day.

“What is the matter, Yasha?” Platonida Ivanovna said to him. “Thou seemest to be tousled to-day, somehow.”… In the old woman’s peculiar language this quite accurately defined Aratoff’s moral condition. He could not work, but even he himself did not know what he wanted. Now he was expecting Kupfer again (he suspected that it was precisely from Kupfer that Clara had obtained his address … and who else could have “talked a great deal” about him?); again he wondered whether his acquaintance with her was to end in that way? … again he imagined that she would write him another letter; again he asked himself whether he ought not to write her a letter, in which he might explain everything to her,—as he did not wish to leave an unpleasant impression of himself…. But, in point of fact, what was he to explain?–Now he aroused in himself something very like disgust for her, for her persistence, her boldness; again that indescribably touching face presented itself to him and her irresistible voice made itself heard; and yet again he recalled her singing, her recitation–and did not know whether he was right in his wholesale condemnation.–In one word: he was a tousled man! At last he became bored with all this and decided, as the saying is, “to take it upon himself” and erase all that affair, as it undoubtedly was interfering with his avocations and disturbing his peace of mind.–He did not find it so easy to put his resolution into effect…. More than a week elapsed before he got back again into his ordinary rut. Fortunately, Kupfer did not present himself at all, any more than if he had not been in Moscow. Not long before the “affair” Aratoff had begun to busy himself with painting for photographic ends; he devoted himself to this with redoubled zeal.