“What are you mumbling to yourself about, Romashov?” asked Alexandra Petrovna severely. “Don’t dare to sit and build castles in the air whilst I am present.”
He smiled at her with a somewhat embarrassed air.
“I was not building castles in the air, but repeating to myself ‘Unser—unser.’ Isn’t it a funny word?”
“What rubbish you are talking! Unser. Why is it funny?”
“You see” (he made a slight pause as if he really intended to think about what he meant to say), “if one repeats the same word for long, and at the same time concentrates on it all his faculty of thought, the word itself suddenly loses all its meaning and becomes—how can I put it?”
“I know, I know!” she interrupted delightedly. “But it is not easy to do it now. When I was a child, now—how we used to love doing it!”
“Yes—yes—it belongs to childhood—yes.”
“How well I remember it! I remember the word ‘perhaps’ particularly struck me. I could sit for a long time with eyes shut, rocking my body to and fro, whilst I was repeatedly saying over and over again, ‘Perhaps, perhaps.’ And suddenly I quite forgot what the word itself meant. I tried to remember, but it was no use. I saw only a little round, reddish blotch with two tiny tails. Are you attending?” Romashov looked tenderly at her.
“How wonderful that we should think the same thoughts!” he exclaimed in a dreamy tone. “But let us return to our unser. Does not this word suggest the idea of something long, thin, lanky, and having a sting—a long, twisting insect, poisonous and repulsive?”
“Unser, did you say?” Shurochka lifted up her head, blinked her eyes, and stared obstinately at the darkest corner of the room. She was evidently striving to improve on Romashov’s fanciful ideas.