“So this is the Executive Committee!” she was saying to herself. This, then, was the mysterious force that people were talking about in timid whispers; that the Czar dreaded; that was going to make everybody free and good and happy. This was it, and she was attending its meeting. She could scarcely believe her senses that she actually was there. She knew many of the members, but she had never seen several of them together. The present meeting almost benumbed her with a feeling of reverence, awe, and gratitude. Even those she had met often since her arrival in St. Petersburg seemed different beings now, as though spiritualised into that mysterious force that seemed mightier than the Czar and holier than divinity. An overpowering state of exaltation, of something akin to the ecstasy of a woman upon taking the veil, came over her. Pavel was dearer than ever to her, but in her present mood their love impressed her as a jarring note. Self-sacrifice, not personal happiness, was what appealed to her, and by degrees she keyed herself up to a frame of mind in which her prospective married life seemed a gross profanation of the sanctuary to which she had been admitted.
“Let us postpone it, Pasha dear,” she whispered to him, with a thrilling sense of sacrificing her happiness to the cause.
“Why?” he demanded in perplexity.
They went into the adjoining room. “What is the trouble? What’s the trouble?” he demanded, light-heartedly.
“No trouble at all, dearest,” she answered affectionately. “You are dearer than ever to me, but pray let us postpone it.”
“But there must be some reason for it,” he said with irritation.
“Don’t be vexed, Pashenka. There is really no special reason. I simply don’t feel like being married—yet. I want to give my life to the movement, Pasha. I am enjoying too much happiness as it is.” She uttered it in grave, measured, matter-of-fact accents, but her hazel eyes reflected the uplifted state of her soul.
“Oh!” he exclaimed with a mixed sense of relief and adoration. “If that’s what you mean, all I can say is that I am not worthy of you, Clara; but of course, the question of giving our lives to the cause has nothing to do with the question of our belonging to each other. Or, rather, it’s one and the same thing.”
She made no reply. The very discussion of the subject jarred on her.