u really not a word to
say?"

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
c