She got up, washed her hands and complied with his wish. As she played with his hand she noticed the trace of blisters on his palm. Her face darkened; but she asked no questions. After a little she demanded: “What did you mean by ‘exiling’ me?”
“Oh dash it all, Clanya. It’s something serious. I’ll tell it to you some other time. I’m too lazy to be serious.” He would have preferred to be sprawling like this with her hands in his; luxuriating in the gleam of her intelligent blue eyes and in the feminine atmosphere of her person; but his excuse that it was “too serious” only sharpened her determination to know what it was without delay.
“What is it, Pasha?”
“There you are,” he said peevishly. “One can’t have a minute’s rest from business, not a minute’s rest.”
“Why did you hasten to speak of ‘exiling’ me, then?” she retorted tartly. “Why didn’t you keep it to yourself until you were again in a mood for ‘business’?”
He had not kept it to himself simply because it was not easy for him to keep anything from her. He was more apt to fly into a temper with her than she with him, but in their mutual relations she was the stronger vessel of the two and, in an imperceptible, unformulated way, he was considerably under her thumb. When he heard or saw something new, received some new impression, his first impulse was to share it with her. If an opinion was formed in his mind he wondered, sometimes timidly, whether she would concur with it. Timidly, because in many instances, when he came bubbling over with enthusiasm over some scheme of his own, she had cruelly dampened his fervour by merely extricating the vital point of his argument from a surrounding tangle of roseate phraseology. His great intellectual feast was to be in her room, discussing theories, books, people with her. These discussions, which sometimes lasted for hours, often called forth a snappish, bitter tone on both sides, but they were at once an expression and a fostering agency of that spiritual unity which was one of the chief sources of their happiness in one another.
“Well, there is very little to tell about,” he said at last. “Something is under way, and it has been decided to notify all illegals not in it to vacate St. Petersburg until it’s all over.”
The lines of her fresh-tinted face hardened into an expression of extreme gravity and her fingers grew limp in his grasp. She withdrew them.
“Look at her!” he squeaked in a burst of merriment.
“There is nothing to look at. I am not going.” She dropped her glance. She divined that his blisters had something to do with the digging of a mine in which he took part.