her face nor her figure,
but from her gentle, weary smile. It was Natalya Stepanovna, or,
as she was called, Kisotchka, the very girl I had been head over
ears in love with seven or eight years before, when I was wearing
the uniform of a high-school boy. The doings of far, vanished days,
the days of long ago. . . . I remember this Kisotchka, a thin little
high-school girl of fifteen or sixteen, when she was something just
for a schoolboy's taste, created by nature especially for Platonic
love. What a charming little girl she was! Pale, fragile, light--
she looked as though a breath would send her flying like a feather
to the skies--a gentle, perplexed face, little hands, soft long
hair to her belt, a waist as thin as a wasp's--altogether something
ethereal, transparent like moonlight--in fact, from the point of
view of a high-school boy a peerless beauty. . . . Wasn't I in love
with her! I did not sleep at night. I wrote verses. . . . Sometimes
in the evenings she would sit on a seat in the park while we
schoolboys crowded round her, gazing reverently; in response to our
compliments, our sighing, and attitudinising, she would shrink
nervously from the evening damp, screw up her eyes, and smile gently,
and at such times she was awfully like a pretty little kitten. As
we gazed at her every one of us had a desire to caress her and
stroke her like a cat, hence her nickname of Kisotchka.

"In the course of the seven or eight years since we had met, Kisotchka
had greatly changed. She had grown more robust and stouter, and had
quite lost the resemblance to a soft, fluffy kitten. It was not
that her features looked old or faded, but they had somehow lost
their brilliance and looked sterner, her hair seemed shorter, she
looked taller, and her shoulders were quite twice as broad, and
what was most striking, there was already in her face the expression
of motherliness and resignation commonly seen in respectable women
of her age, and this, of course, I had never seen in her before. . . .
In short, of the school-girlish and the Platonic her face had
kept the gentle smile and nothing more. . . .

"We got into conversation. Learning that I was already an engineer,
Kisotchka was immensely delighted.

"'How good that is!' she said, looking joyfully into my face. 'Ah,
how good! And how splendid you all are! Of all who left with you,
not one has been a failure--they have all turned out well. One
an engineer, another a doctor, a thir