If I should die before I wake...
(Here Olga and I used always to interpolate a short prayer of our own invention: “Please, dear God, do not on any account let us die to-night. Amen.”)—when Vassili interrupted me.
“Haven't you finished?” he cried, putting his arm round my neck. “You are very tiresome. You bore me to extinction.”
“You bore me!” That was the perpetual refrain of all his days. I always bored him. Perhaps it was not surprising. At seventeen one is not always clever and entertaining, especially outside the family circle. At home I had always been considered rather witty and intelligent, but to Vassili I was never anything but “a dreadful bore.”
When I caught sight of him pinching Rosalia's cheek and I burst into tears: “You are a fearful bore,” he said crossly. If I noticed the scent of musk or patchouli on his coat and ventured to question him about it—“You are an insufferable little bore,” would be all the answer I got. When he went out (taking the music of “My Savage Plains” with him) and stayed away all night, on his return next morning I sobbed out my anguish on his breast. “I must say you bore me to death,” he yawned.
And one day I heard that he had had a child by a German baroness.
At the sight of my paroxysm of despair he grew angry. “What does it matter to you, silly creature, since you have not got one yourself?” he exclaimed. “Wearisome little bore that you are; you can't even have a child.”
I was aghast. What—what did he mean? Why could I not—?
“No! no!” he shouted, with his handsome mouth rounded and open like those of the stone cherubs on the walls of his castle, “you will never have any children. You are not a woman. Your mother herself said so.” And the look which he flashed across my frail body cut me like a sword.
I fell fainting to the ground.