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Platosha ceased speaking and took herself off…. She probably had never made such a long and animated speech before since she was born … but Aratoff thought:

“I do believe my aunt is right…. It is all because I am not used to such things….” (He really had attracted the attention of the female sex to himself for the first time … at any rate, he had never noticed it before.) “I must not indulge myself.”

So he set to work at his books, and drank some linden-flower tea when he went to bed, and even slept well all that night, and had no dreams. On the following morning he busied himself with his photography, as though nothing had happened….

But toward evening his spiritual serenity was again disturbed.

VI

To wit: a messenger brought him a note, written in a large, irregular feminine hand, which ran as follows:

“If you guess who is writing to you, and if it does not bore you, come to-morrow, after dinner, to the Tver boulevard–about five o’clock–and wait. You will not be detained long. But it is very important. Come.”

There was no signature. Aratoff instantly divined who his correspondent was, and that was precisely what disturbed him.–“What nonsense!” he said, almost aloud. “This is too much! Of course I shall not go.”–Nevertheless, he ordered the messenger to be summoned, and from him he learned merely that the letter had been handed to him on the street by a maid. Having dismissed him, Aratoff reread the letter, and flung it on the floor…. But after a while he picked it up and read it over again; a second time he cried: “Nonsense!” He did not throw the letter on the floor this time, however, but put it away in a drawer.

Aratoff went about his customary avocations, busying himself now with one, now with another; but his work did not make progress, was not a success. Suddenly he noticed that he was waiting for Kupfer, that he wanted to interrogate him, or even communicate something to him…. But Kupfer did not make his appearance. Then Aratoff got Pushkin and read Tatyana’s letter and again felt convinced that that “gipsy” had not in the least grasped the meaning of the letter. But there was that jester Kupfer shouting: “A Rachel! A Viardot!” Then he went to his piano, raised the cover in an abstracted sort of way, tried to search out in his memory the melody of Tchaikovsky’s romance; but he immediately banged to the piano-lid with vexation and went to his aunt, in her own room, which was always kept very hot, and was forever redolent of mint, sage, and other medicinal herbs, and crowded with such a multitude of rugs, etageres, little benches, cushions and various articles of softly-stuffed furniture that it was difficult for an inexperienced person to turn round in it, and breathing was oppressive. Platonida Ivanovna was sitting by the window with her knitting-needles in her hand (she was knitting a scarf for Yashenka–the thirty-eighth, by actual count, during the course of his existence!)–and was greatly surprised. Aratoff rarely entered her room, and if he needed anything he always shouted in a shrill voice from his study: “Aunt Platosha!”–But she made him sit down and, in anticipation of his first words, pricked up her ears, as she stared at him through her round spectacles with one eye, and above them with the other. She did not inquire after his health, and did not offer him tea, for she saw that he had not come for that. Aratoff hesitated for a while … then began to talk … to talk about his mother, about the way she had lived with his father, and how his father had made her acquaintance. He knew all this perfectly well … but he wanted to talk precisely about that. Unluckily for him, Platosha did not know how to converse in the least; she made very brief replies, as though she suspected that Yasha had not come for that purpose.