Bobrov threw the reins to the mill groom who had run up, patted the horse’s strong neck, dark with sweat, and followed Nina into the drawing-room. Anna Afanasyevna, who was sitting by the samovar all alone, affected great amazement at Bobrov’s arrival.

“Well, well! Andrei Ilyich!” she cried in a singsong. “Here you come at last!”

She pushed her hand against his lips as he greeted her, and asked him with her nasal twang, “Tea? Milk? Apples? What will you have?”

“Merci, Anna Afanasyevna.”

“Merci oui, ou merci non?”

French phrases like these were common in the Zinenko family. Bobrov would not have anything.

“Then go to the veranda,” Mme Zinenko permitted him graciously. “The young people are playing forfeits or something there.”

When he appeared on the veranda all the four young ladies exclaimed in unison, in exactly the same tone, and with the same twang, as their mother, “Well, well! Andrei Ilyich! Here’s someone we haven’t seen for ages! What will you have? Tea? Apples? Milk? Nothing? You don’t mean that! Perhaps you will have something, after all? Well, then sit down here and join in.”

They played “The Lady’s Sent a Hundred Rubles,” “Opinions,” and a game which lisping Kasya called “playing bowlth.” The guests were three students, who kept on sticking out their chests and striking dramatic attitudes, with one foot forward and one hand in the back pocket of their frock-coats; Miller, a technician distinguished by his good looks, stupidity, and wonderful baritone; and lastly a taciturn gentleman in grey, of whom nobody took any notice.

The game was not going well. The men performed their forfeits with a condescending, bored air, and the young ladies refused to perform theirs at all, whispering among themselves and laughing unnaturally.

Dusk was falling. A huge red moon floated up from behind the house-tops of the nearby village.

“Come inside, children!” Anna Afanasyevna shouted from the dining-room. “Ask Miller to sing for us.”

A moment later the young ladies’ voices rang through the rooms.

“We had a very good time,” they chirped round their mother. “We laughed so much!”

Nina and Bobrov remained on the veranda. She sat on the handrail, hugging a post with her left arm and nestling against it in an unconsciously graceful posture. Bobrov placed himself at her feet, on a low garden bench; as he looked up into her face he saw the delicate outlines of her throat and chin.

“Come on, tell me something interesting, Andrei Ilyich,” she commanded impatiently.

“I really don’t know what to tell you,” he replied. “It’s awfully hard to speak to order. So I’m wondering if there’s some collection of dialogues on various topics.”

“Fie! What a bo-ore you are,” she drawled. “Tell me, are you ever in good spirits?”

“And you tell me why you’re so afraid of silence. You feel uneasy the moment talk runs low. Is it so bad to talk silently?”

“ ‘Let’s be silent tonight,’ “ Nina sang, teasingly.

“Yes, let’s. Look: the sky is clear, the moon is red and big, and it’s so quiet out here. What else do we need?”

“ ‘And this barren and silly moon in these barren and silly heavens,’ “ Nina recited. “A propos, have you heard that Zina Makova is engaged to Protopopov? Going to marry him, after all! I can’t make out that Protopopov.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Zina refused him three times, but still he wouldn’t give up, and proposed for the fourth time. Well, he’ll have only himself to blame. She may come to respect him, but she’ll certainly never love him!”

These words were enough to make Bobrov’s gorge rise. He was always exasperated by the Zinenkos’ shallow, small-town vocabulary, made up of expressions like “She loves him, but doesn’t respect him,” or “She respects him, but doesn’t love him.” To their minds, these words fully described the most intricate relationships between man and woman. Likewise, they had only two expressions – “dark-haired” and “fair-haired” – to cover the whole range of the moral, intellectual, and physical peculiarities of any person.

Prompted by a vague desire to goad his anger, Bobrov asked, “And what sort of a man is this Protopopov?”

“Protopopov?” Nina reflected for a second. “He’s – well, he’s rather tall, with brown hair.”

“Is that all?”

“What else do you want? Oh, yes, he’s an exciseman.”

“And that is all? But can’t you really describe a man any better than that he has brown hair and is an exciseman, Nina Grigoryevna? Just think how many interesting, gifted and clever people we come across in life. Are they all nothing but ‘brown-haired excisemen’? See how eagerly peasant children watch life and how apt their judgement is. But you, an alert and sensitive girl, take no interest in anything, because you have a stock of a dozen battered drawing-room phrases. I know that if somebody mentions the moon in conversation you’re sure to put in ‘Like this barren and silly moon,’ etc. And if I tell you, say, about an unusual occurrence, I know beforehand that your comment will be, ‘A legend fresh but difficult to credit.’ It’s always like that, always. Believe me, for goodness’ sake, that all that is original and distinctive – ”

“I beg you not to lecture me!” Nina retorted.

He fell silent, with a bitter taste in his mouth, and they both sat for fully five minutes or so without speaking or moving. Suddenly rich chords rang out from the drawing-room, and they heard Miller start singing in a voice which, though slightly spoiled, was very expressive:

Where dancing was loudest and maddest,

In vanity’s violent pace,

I saw thee – the saddest of secrets

Look’d out from thy lovely face.

Bobrov’s anger soon subsided, and he felt sorry that he had vexed Nina. “What made me expect original daring from her fresh, naive mind?” he thought. “Why, she’s like a little bird: she chirps the first thing that comes into her head, and who knows whether her chirping isn’t much better than talk about women’s emancipation, Nietzsche, or the decadents?”

“Please don’t be cross with me, Nina Grigoryevna,” he said under his breath. “I let my tongue run away with me and said a lot of foolish things.”

Nina made no reply, but sat looking away at the rising moon. In the darkness he found her hand hanging down and clasped it tenderly.

“Please, Nina Grigoryevna,” he whispered.

She suddenly turned to him and responded with a swift, nervous handshake.

“What a bad temper you have!” she exclaimed in a tone of forgiveness and reproach. “You always hurt me, knowing that I can’t be cross with you!”

Pushing away his hand, which trembled suddenly, and almost breaking away from him, she ran across the veranda and into the house.

Miller sang with passion and melancholy:

And through unknown visions I rove.

I know not if thee my love glories,

I only know well that I love.

“’I only know well that I love’!” Bobrov repeated in an excited whisper, drawing a deep breath and pressing his hand to his throbbing heart.

“Why, then, do I exhaust myself in fruitless dreams of an unknown, lofty happiness while there is a plain but deep happiness here beside me?” he thought, moved. “What else do I want of a woman, of a wife who is so tender, so fetching, so gentle, and attentive? We poor nervous wrecks can’t take the joys of life as they are, but must poison them with our insatiable desire to rake in every feeling and every intention, whether it’s ours or somebody else’s. This still night, the proximity of the girl I love, her sweet, artless talk, a momentary flash of anger and then a sudden caress – Heavens! Isn’t this what makes life worth living?”

When he entered the drawing-room he looked cheerful, nearly triumphant. His eyes met Nina’s, and he read in her gaze a tender answer to his thoughts. “She shall be my wife,” he said to himself, calmly happy.

They were talking about Kvashnin. Filling the room with the ring of her confident voice, Anna Afanasyevna said that she too was going to take her “little girls” to the station on the following day.

“Vasily Terentyevich may well wish to pay us a visit. Anyway, Liza Belokonskaya – she’s a niece of my cousin’s husband – wrote me about his trip a month ago.”

“Isn’t that Belokonskaya the one whose brother is married to Princess Mukhovetskaya?” Zinenko humbly put in the usual comment.

“Yes.” Anna Afanasyevna nodded with condescension. “She’s also a distant relative on her grandmother’s side of the Stremoukhovs, whom you know. Well, she wrote me she had met Vasily Terentyevich at a party and had recommended him to call on us if it ever occurred to him to visit the mill.”

“Shall we be able to receive him properly, Anna?” Zinenko asked anxiously.

“The funny way you talk! We’ll do our best. But of course we can’t expect to impress a man who has a yearly income of three hundred thousand rubles.”

“Dear me! Three hundred thousand!” groaned Zinenko. “It gives you the creeps to think of it.”

“Three hundred thousand!” Nina echoed with a sigh.

“Three hundred thousand!” exclaimed the other young ladies in an ecstatic chorus.

“Yes, and he spends all of it, to the last kopek,” said Anna Afanasyevna. Then, in reply to an unexpressed thought of her daughters, she added: “He’s married. Only they say his marriage is a failure. His wife has no personality and isn’t distinguished at all. And a wife should give tone to her husband’s business activities, whatever you may say.”

“Three hundred thousand!” said Nina once more, as if in delirium. “The things you could do with that money!”

Anna Afanasyevna ran her hand over Nina’s luxuriant hair.

“It wouldn’t be bad to have a husband like him, my child, would it?”

That income of three hundred thousand rubles, which belonged to another man, seemed to have galvanized the whole company. Stories were told, and listened to, with gleaming eyes and flushed faces, about the life of millionaires, their fabulous dinners, their magnificent horses, the dancing-parties they gave, the unheard-of extravagance of their spending.

Bobrov’s heart went cold and shrank painfully. Quietly he took his hat and walked stealthily out on to the porch. However, no one would have noticed his departure anyway.

Riding home at a smart trot and recalling Nina’s languid, dreamy eyes as she whispered, almost distractedly, “Three hundred thousand!” he suddenly thought of the story which Svezhevsky had insisted on telling him that morning.

“This one’s just as capable of selling herself,” he whispered, clenching his teeth and furiously laying his whip on Fairway’s neck.