“Foolishness!... Just lad’s love.... But you weren’t in love with me at all; you fell in love with the Sinyelnikofs, all four of them, one after the other. When the eldest girl married you placed your heart at the feet of the next sister, and so on.”
“Ah-ha! You were just a little jealous, eh?” remarked Voznitsin with jocular self-satisfaction.
“Oh, not at all!... You were like Arkasha’s brother.... Afterwards, later, when you were about seventeen perhaps, I was a little vexed to think you had changed towards me.... You know, its ridiculous, but girls have hearts like women. We may not love a silent adorer, but we are jealous if he pays attentions to others.... But that’s all nonsense. Tell me more about yourself, where you live, and what you do.”
He told her of his life—at college, in the army, about the war, and his present position. No, he had never married—at first he had feared poverty and the responsibility of a family, and now it was too late. He had had flirtations, of course, and even some serious romances.
The conversation ceased after a while, and they sat silent, looking at one another with tender, tear-dimmed eyes. In Voznitsin’s memory the long past of thirty years ago came swiftly again before him. He had known Lenotchka when he was eleven years old. She had been a naughty, fidgetty sort of girl, fond of telling tales and liking to make trouble. Her face was covered with freckles, she had long arms and legs, pale eyelashes, and disorderly red hair hanging about her face in long wisps. Her sister Oletchka was different; she had always kept apart, and behaved like a sensible girl. On holidays they all went together to dances at the Assembly Rooms, to the theatre, the circus, to the skating rink. They got up Christmas parties and children’s plays together; they coloured eggs at Easter and dressed up at Christmas. They quarrelled and carried on together like young puppies.
There were three years of that. Lenotchka used to go away every summer with her people to their country house at Jemakino, and that year, when she returned to Moscow in the autumn, Voznitsin opened both eyes and mouth in astonishment. She was changed; you couldn’t say that she was beautiful, but there was something in her face more wonderful than actual beauty, a rosy radiant blossoming of the feminine being in her. It is so sometimes. God knows how the miracle takes place, but in a few weeks, an awkward, undersized, gawky schoolgirl will develop suddenly into a charming maiden. Lenotchka’s face still kept her summer sunburn, under which her ardent young blood flowed gaily, her shoulders had filled out, her figure rounded itself, and her soft breasts had a firm outline—all her body had become willowy, graceful, gracious.
And their relations towards one another had changed also. They became different after one Saturday evening when the two of them, frolicking together before church service in a dimly lighted room, began to wrestle together and fight. The windows were wide open, and from the garden came the clear freshness of autumn and a slight winey odour of fallen leaves, and slowly one after another rang out the sounds of the church bells.
They struggled together; their arms were round each other so that their bodies were pressed closely together and they were breathing in each other’s faces. Suddenly Lenotchka, her face flaming crimson even in the darkening twilight, her eyes dilated, began to whisper angrily and confusedly:
“Let me go ... let go.... I don’t want to...,” adding with a malicious gleam in her wet eyes: “Nasty, horrid boy.”
The nasty, horrid boy released her and stood there, awkwardly stretching out his trembling arms. His legs trembled also, and his forehead was wet with a sudden perspiration. He had just now felt in his arms the slender responsive waist of a woman, broadening out so wonderfully to the rounded hips; he had felt on his bosom the pliant yielding contact of her firm, high, girlish breasts and breathed the perfume of her body—that pleasant intoxicating scent of opening poplar buds and young shoots of black-currant bushes which one smells on a clear damp evening of spring after a slight shower, when the sky and the rain-pools flame with crimson and the may beetles hum in the air.