When they had entered the house, and, in the evening light, Startseff saw her face and her melancholy eyes turned on him full of gratitude and suffering, he felt uneasy and thought again:
“It’s a good thing I didn’t marry her!”
He began to take his leave.
“No law of the Medes and Persians allows you to go away before supper!” cried Turkin, accompanying him to the door. “It is extremely peripatetic on your part. Come, do your act!” he cried to Pava as they reached the front hall.
Pava, no longer a boy, but a young fellow with a moustache, struck an attitude, raised one hand, and said in a tragic voice:
“Die, unhappy woman!”
All this irritated Startseff, and as he took his seat in his carriage and looked at the house and the dark garden that had once been so dear to him, he was overwhelmed by the recollection of Madame Turkin’s novels and Kitty’s noisy playing and Turkin’s witticisms and Pava’s tragic pose, and, as he recalled them, he thought:
“If the cleverest people in town are as stupid as that, what a deadly town this must be!”
Three days later Pava brought the doctor a letter from Katherine.
“You don’t come to see us; why?” she wrote. “I am afraid your feeling for us has changed, and the very thought of that terrifies me. Calm my fears; come and tell me that all is well! I absolutely must see you.