. . I am stupid and absurd!"

At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping
her shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.

Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone. Going back to the copse, he walked
slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate
with an expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could
not believe his own memory. He looked for Vera's footprints on the
road, and could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him
had just declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly
"refused" her. For the first time in his life it was his lot to
learn by experience how little that a man does depends on his own
will, and to suffer in his own person the feelings of a decent
kindly man who has against his will caused his neighbour cruel,
undeserved anguish.

His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as
though he had lost something very precious, something very near and
dear which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part
of his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which
he had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.

When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought. He
wanted to discover the reason of his strange coldness. That it was
due to something within him and not outside himself was clear to
him. He frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the
intellectual coldness of which clever people so often boast, not
the coldness of a conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul,
incapacity for being moved by beauty, premature old age brought on
by education, his casual existence, struggling for a livelihood,
his homeless life in lodgings. From the bridge he walked slowly,
as it were reluctantly, into the wood. Here, where in the dense
black darkness glaring patches of moonlight gleamed here and there,
where he felt nothing except his thoughts, he longed passionately
to regain what he had lost.

And Ivan Alexeyitch remembers that he went back again. Urging himself
on with his memories, forcing himself to picture Vera, he strode
rapidly towards the garden. There was no mist by then along the
road or in the garden, and the bright moon looked down from the sky
as though it had just been washed; only the eastern sky was dark
and misty. . . . Ognev remembers his cautious steps, the dark
windows, the heavy scent of heliotrope and mignonette. His old
friend Karo, wagging