owing beforehand that he would not believe
her. "And if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another
life! I think of it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm
actually came into her eyes. "To be good, honest, pure, not to be
lying; to have an object in life."

"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon
my word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple
people."

To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she
began talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem
of her life and to become something real.

"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"

And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for
a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever,
ironical face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.

"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed
to him, and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were
twitching with shame. "I love you. Why do you torture me?"

She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for
a long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though
she knew it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of
her, that a servant might come in.

"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.

When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was
sitting at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him,
gazing greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a
little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat
her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:

"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was
getting ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:

"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as
though she wanted to seize his answer in them.

"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's
thought. "To-morrow, perhaps."

And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to
see Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter
somewhere over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's
and found that he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and
drove aimlessly