“No, wait. Unser is something green and sharp. Well, we’ll suppose it is an insect—a grasshopper, for instance—but big, disgusting, and poisonous. But how stupid we are, Romochka!”
“There’s another thing I do sometimes, only it was much easier when I was a child,” resumed Romashov in a mysterious tone. “I used to take a word and pronounce it slowly, extremely slowly. Every letter was drawn out and emphasized interminably. All of a sudden I was seized by a strangely inexpressible feeling: all—everything near me sank into an abyss, and I alone remained, marvelling that I lived, thought, and spoke.”
“I, too, have had a similar sensation,” interrupted Shurochka gaily, “yet not exactly the same. Sometimes I made violent efforts to hold my breath all the time I was thinking. ‘I am not breathing, and I won’t breathe again till, till’—then all at once I felt as if time was running past me. No, time no longer existed; it was as if—oh, I can’t explain!”
Romashov gazed into her enthusiastic eyes, and repeated in a low tone, thrilling with happiness—
“No, you can’t explain it. It is strange—inexplicable.”
Nikoläiev got up from the table where he had been working. His back ached, and his legs had gone dead from long sitting in the same uncomfortable position. The arteries of his strong, muscular body throbbed when, with arms raised high, he stretched himself to his full length.
“Look here, my learned psychologists, or whatever I should call you, it is supper-time.”
A cold collation had been laid in the comfortable little dining-room, where, suspended from the ceiling, a china lamp with frosted glass shed its clear light. Nikoläiev never touched spirits, but a little decanter of schnapps had been put on the table for Romashov. Shurochka, contorting her pretty face by a contemptuous grimace, said, in the careless tone she so often adopted—
“Of course, you can’t do without that poison?”
Romashov smiled guiltily, and in his confusion the schnapps went the wrong way, and set him coughing.