Aunt Sonia, rectilinear and asexual in her gray flannel dressing-gown, comes in softly and bends over me.
“You must trust in Providence,” she says, raising towards the ceiling her long virginal face. “And take a little camomile tea. That always does one good.”
I obey her meekly and gratefully. It comforts me to think that a day will come when I also shall be like Aunt Sonia; when I also shall be content to wear gray flannel dressing-gowns and turn in my sorrows to Providence and to camomile tea.
And I wish that that day of peace were near.
XI
So we stayed on in Kieff and Bozevsky came to see us every day. He brought me flowers—wonderful orchids the color of amethyst, tenuous contorted blossoms that looked as if they had bloomed in some garden of dreams. He brought me books; books of nebulous German poetry; Spanish plays by Echegaray all heroism and fire; and disquieting, neurotic French novels. Then he brought me English books which filled me with pleasant surprise. How far removed from our Slav souls were those limpid Anglo-Saxon minds! How child-like and simple was their wit, how bland and practical their outlook on life. That was the literature I liked best of all; perhaps because it was so different from everything in myself. I felt that I was a strange, ambiguous, complicated creature compared with those candid elemental natures.
Bozevsky liked to find me reading. He would arrive in the evening—usually after Vassili had gone out, alone or with friends—and enter the drawing-room with bright and cheerful greeting. He always smiled when he found me with one of his books in my hand, sitting beside Aunt Sonia placidly knitting in her armchair.
“I like your thoughts to be far away from here,” he would say, kissing my hand. “I like to know that your soul is far from the frivolous society you live in, far from the petty preoccupations, the compliments and the flattery which surround you. Let me read with you; let me join you in the purer realm of fancy, far away from the world.” And he would sit down beside me, with an air of protecting fraternal affection.
One evening he found me nervous and agitated.